Richard Matheson wrote the apocalyptic novel, I Am Legend, in 1954. It is the story of the last man alive in a world overrun by a changed, bestial version of humanity. It is partly a vampire story. It is partly a zombie story. It is one of the definitive end of the world stories. I cannot help but hear Michael Stipe‘s rapid-fire mumble in the background as I read it. The novel has been adapted into film three times: Vincent Price starred in The Last Man on Earth in 1964. Charlton Heston starred in The Omega Man in 1971. Will Smith stars in the recently released film by the same name, I Am Legend. While I have only ever seen The Omega Man, I understand each of these film adaptations differ from the original novel in varying ways. I like a good vampire story; I like good zombie stories too. And you just can’t go wrong with positing the end of the world in gruesome ways.

So while the wintertime temperature plummets in Chicago, I think I’m going to curl up with a good book, maybe light a fire and see how Robert Neville gets through the original version of this story. If he does.

I discovered Max Frisch in the very early spring of 1991. I was living in Tübingen, Germany and picked up Homo Faber on the recommendation from a friend of mine at the university. The title is Latin for “man the maker”: a creature who controls his environment with tools. Stefan based his recommendation on my literary interests of the day and my desire to read modern literature in German. By the time I had completed the book, Max Frisch had died and Volker Schlöndorff had completed a film version of the story. Walter Faber, the story’s engineer protragonist, does not believe in coincidence or fate. Mathematics explains his life adequately as well as he is concerned. He tells you this in the first few pages. In this early paragraph, Frisch delivers all of the major plot points of his novel. All of the story’s dramatic twists and turns he lays out in a concise description without embarassment. And still we read on, we read the remaining two hundred pages as if we had forgotten he had told of all of this. I think we read on because it is the telling of the story that is important, rather than the particular results. All of this came back to me as I picked up the novel again. Sadly, I have not been able to find the film version since viewing it at the Universität Tübingen cinema.

My German Sprachkentnisse has waned in the intervening years, so this time I’m reading the Michael Bullock translation. Faber describes his life, or at least that significant portion of it in the novel, as eine ganze Kette von Zufällen— a whole chain of accidents. That description has resonated with me ever since: a series of otherwise disconnected events, some beautiful, some ugly where the only common element is my having lived them.

Not ten minutes after I finished reading The Mist, Whirl pressed this collection of Stephen King stories into my hand, Everything’s Eventual. She pointed out the inclusion of at least two Dark Tower-related stories: “The Little Sisters of Eluria” and “Everything’s Eventual”. When I cracked the binding I also discovered the collection includes the story “1408”. Whirl and I watched the movie adaptation of that story just a few weeks ago.

So as I dive into these 14 stories, I think I’ll follow the Tarot-inspired ordering of them without alteration. There are days when I just want an author to tell me a good story and I don’t read much more into it than that. These are those days.

Stephen King published The Mist twice before: the novella is included both as part of a broader 1980 anthology of horror stories from various authors entitled Dark Forces and in a 1985 collection of entirely Stephen King stories, Skeleton Crew. In conjunction with the movie adaptation of the story, publishers have brought a new, standalone, version to market. I had to take a quick trip to St. Paul, Minnesota for work, so I dragged this along for something to read on the plane. It is interesting to me to note that my plane left the Minneapolis-St. Paul runway just as a powerful winter snowstorm descended on the region.

King has an uncanny ability to take the most mundane item or experience and instill it with terror. I still remember an interview he did on the Tonight Show where he transformed a simple rocking chair into an item of utter horror. King did this spontaneously, without preparation. This is what King does with The Mist. He wrestles with the concepts of desolation and desperation, giving monstrous form to those fears from the amorphous void of a powerful summer storm followed by an even more mysterious fog.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to attend a reading at the Printers Row Book Fair. Neil Gaiman read from his children’s story, The Wolves in the Walls. He spoke about writing and comic books and film. He told stories about his life and his family. At the time, The Wolves in the Walls was not yet published. Dave McKean had not finished most of the artwork. After he had read the story, Gaiman took questions from the audience and signed books. I had recently finished his novel, Neverwhere, and had added him to my ever expanding list of favorite authors. I have anticipated each of his new books as they come out.

Fragile Things is Gaiman’s latest book. Published in 2006, Fragile Things is the third Gaiman collection of short stories and poetry. One short story in this compendium, “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, was nominated for a 2006 Hugo Award. Another, “A Study in Emerald,” won the Hugo Award in 2004 for best short story. In “A Study in Emerald”, Gaiman fulfills an editor’s request: “I want a story in which Sherlock Holmes meets the world of H. P. Lovecraft.” Reviews of this collection have been mixed– the San Diego Union-Tribune took real issue with Gaiman and described him as “a bantamweight Poe”. I attribute this accusation to the fact that they do not know how to categorize Gaiman as an author and this condition makes them uncomfortable. I find the comparison to Poe short-sighted. Like so many other authors I enjoy, Gaiman refuses to sit quietly in a particular genre or literary space. I cherish these sorts of collections as a way to showcase the breadth of an author’s talents; I see them as literary sandboxes into which they have invited me to play along.