NO. 5
The Neil Gaiman Strangeness Trick
I recently finished reading American Gods. I thought it was excellent and captured a certain part of America very well — but that is not why I’m writing this short note.
I’m writing it because, the more I read Neil Gaiman, the more I notice a fun literary trick he uses to induce strangeness, the feeling that something is not quite as you think it is, in his stories. I’m writing it down so I can remember it, and because I thought it was interesting.
A simple example of this is when, near the end of American Gods, there is a line that includes the words, “eyes, and things that were not eyes”.
You read that and you think, shit, what are the things that are not eyes? It gets you thinking. It is weird.
And there is is a line in Anansi Boys that describes someone as “a man, and not a man”.
Then, just a few chapters later in Anansi Boys, Neil does it again: in describing the way a character called Spider walks into a photograph, he writes that it was hard to tell whether the photograph got bigger or Spider got smaller — but that really it was likely that neither of those things really happened, and yet the man walked into the photograph nonetheless.
In all of these moments, Neil Gaiman is using a point of reference (eyes, a man, a size-shift of a man and a photograph) to give us the shape of what he is describing.
Then he tells us the thing he’s describing is not actually the shape he’s given us, not really. But we’ve already got the shape in our head and so the rejection of it makes things feel strange and informs the way we imagine it.
Because while having mysterious, god-like things looking at you might be sort of strange, having things that were not eyes looking at you invokes a whole different type of weird.
I recently finished reading American Gods. I thought it was excellent and captured a certain part of America very well — but that is not why I’m writing this short note.
I’m writing it because, the more I read Neil Gaiman, the more I notice a fun literary trick he uses to induce strangeness, the feeling that something is not quite as you think it is, in his stories. I’m writing it down so I can remember it, and because I thought it was interesting.
A simple example of this is when, near the end of American Gods, there is a line that includes the words, “eyes, and things that were not eyes”.
You read that and you think, shit, what are the things that are not eyes? It gets you thinking. It is weird.
And there is is a line in Anansi Boys that describes someone as “a man, and not a man”.
Then, just a few chapters later in Anansi Boys, Neil does it again: in describing the way a character called Spider walks into a photograph, he writes that it was hard to tell whether the photograph got bigger or Spider got smaller — but that really it was likely that neither of those things really happened, and yet the man walked into the photograph nonetheless.
In all of these moments, Neil Gaiman is using a point of reference (eyes, a man, a size-shift of a man and a photograph) to give us the shape of what he is describing.
Then he tells us the thing he’s describing is not actually the shape he’s given us, not really. But we’ve already got the shape in our head and so the rejection of it makes things feel strange and informs the way we imagine it.
Because while having mysterious, god-like things looking at you might be sort of strange, having things that were not eyes looking at you invokes a whole different type of weird.