aoife

I've been having really really vivid dreams and then waking up wild-eyed alone in my bed, freaked out because my baby doesn't sleep well and he's probably in the kitchen or the other room somewhere, but for a second I'm alone and have to deal with the weird products of my mind. Some of these dreams include exboyfriends, San Francisco, my sister, and fish with stingray stingers.

There is a new Neil Gaiman book out now, a book of short stories which I will shortly be devouring. There is not much better than walking into the local bookstore (well, it's a Barnes & Noble, but whatever) on a day off that I shouldn't have had because I was excused from jury duty last-minute, and seeing the name Neil Gaiman on the new fiction table.

I've enjoyed watching Neil go from the cult comics author that my hip older goth friend introduced me to in high school to a New York Times top ten-type. Because though it's not like a little club anymore that you're in when you meet someone else who loves Gaiman (that's reserved for smaller subsets of Gaiman fans, like those of us who lust after Dave McKean's art), everyone deserves fairy tales, and no one writes them better than Neil.

The world is a big scary place, after all, even when you're supposedly grown, and fear of the dark doesn't go away when you get a real job. We need fairy tales. Even if some of them are scarier than the real world (hard to do).