Trigger Warning

We first met Baldur ‘Shadow’ Moon in American Gods, in which he gets caught up in a war between gods in America. In ‘The Monarch of the Glen’, a story in the Fragile Things collection, Shadow found himself a bouncer at a party in northern Scotland.

He is on his way back to America, but in this story has only made it as far as Derbyshire’s Peak District. (This was the very last of the stories in this book to be written and is, as they say on the book jackets, original to this collection.)

I want to thank my friends Colin Greenland and Susanna Clarke for taking me to the Three Stags Heads pub in Wardlow, which, cat, lurchers and all, inspired the opening, and to Colin for telling me that Black Shuck walked Trot Lane, when I asked him about black dogs.

There is one last story to be told, about what happens to Shadow when he reaches London. And then, if he survives that, it will be time to send him back to America. So much has changed, after all, since he went away.

VI. FINAL WARNING

There are monsters in these pages, but as Ogden Nash pointed out in my first short-story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, where there’s a monster, there’s also a miracle.

There are some long stories and some short ones. There are a handful of poems, which perhaps might need their own warning for the people who are frightened, disturbed, or terminally puzzled by poetry. (In my second short-story collection, Fragile Things, I tried to explain that the poems come free. They are bonuses for the kind of people who do not need to worry about sneaky and occasional poems lurking inside their short-story collections.)

There. Consider yourself warned. There are so many little triggers out there, being squeezed in the darkness even as I write this. This book is correctly labelled. Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.

Thank you for coming. Enjoy the things that never happened. Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.

NEIL GAIMAN, In a cabin in the dark woods, 2014

Making a Chair