Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

by Neil Gaiman

And what we learn about ourselves in those moments, where the trigger has been squeezed, is this: the past is not dead.

What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk. We need to find out what fiction is, what it means, to us, an experience that is going to be unlike anyone else’s experience of the story.

I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?

We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting. These are stories about those masks, and the people we are underneath them. We authors, who trade in fictions for a living, are a continuum of all that we have seen and heard, and most importantly, all that we have read.

I was once a blank piece of parchment too, waiting to be inscribed. I learned about things and people from stories, and I learned about other authors from stories.

grew up loving and respecting short stories. They seemed to me to be the purest and most perfect things people could make: not a word wasted, in the best of them.

and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.

“It’s like I always say, people think they are buying the art, but really, they’re buying the story.”