There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma （he died in 2002）， who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable—you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back.
“Sunbird” was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look. Holly didn’t get it until her nineteen-and-a-halfth birthday, when I was in the middle of writing Anansi Boys and decided that if I didn’t finish writing something—anything—I would probably go mad. With her permission it was published in a book with an extremely long title, often abbreviated to Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t As Scary…， as a benefit for the literacy program 826 NYC.
Even if you have this book, you might still want to pick up a copy of the book with the extremely long title, because it has Clement Freud’s story “Grimble” in it.
“INVENTING ALADDIN”
One thing that puzzles me （and I use puzzle here in the technical sense of really, really irritates me） is reading, as from time to time I have, learned academic books on folktales and fairy stories that explain why nobody wrote them and which go on to point out that looking for authorship of folktales is in itself a fallacy; the kind of books or articles that give the impression that all stories were stumbled upon or, at best, reshaped, and I think, Yes, but they all started somewhere, in someone’s head. Because stories start in minds—they aren’t artifacts or natural phenomena.
One scholarly book I read explained that any fairy story in which a character falls asleep obviously began life as a dream that was recounted on waking by a primitive type unable to tell dreams from reality, and this was the starting point for our fairy stories—a theory which seemed filled with holes from the get-go, because stories, the kind that survive and are retold, have narrative logic, not dream logic.
Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There’s the magic of it.
Scheherazade as a narrator was a fiction, as was her sister and the murderous king they needed nightly to placate. The Arabian Nights are a fictional construct, assembled from a variety of places, and the story of Aladdin is itself a late tale, folded into the Nights by the French only a few hundred years ago. Which is another way of saying that when it began, it certainly didn’t begin as I describe. And yet. And still.
“THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN”
A story that began with, and exists because of, my love of the remoter parts of Scotland, where the bones of the Earth show through, and the sky is a pale white, and it’s all astoundingly beautiful, and it feels about as remote as any place can possibly be. It was good to catch up with Shadow, two years after the events in my novel American Gods.
Robert Silverberg asked me for a novella for his second Legends collection. He didn’t mind if I wrote a Neverwhere novella or an American Gods novella. The Neverwhere novella I began had some technical troubles （it was called “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back” and I shall finish it one day）。 I began writing “The Monarch of the Glen” in a flat in Notting Hill, where I was directing a short film called “A Short Film about John Bolton,” and finished it in one long mad winter’s dash in the cabin by the lake where I’m currently typing this introduction. My friend Iselin Evensen from Norway first told me tales of the huldra, and she corrected my Norwegian. Like “Bay Wolf” in Smoke and Mirrors, this was influenced by Beowulf, and by the time I wrote it I was certain that the script for Beowulf that I had written for and with Roger Avary would never be made. I was of course wrong, but I enjoy the gulf between Angelina Jolie’s portrayal of Grendel’s mother in the Robert Zemeckis film and the version of the character that turns up here.
I want to thank all the editors of the various volumes in which these stories and poems first appeared, and particularly to thank Jennifer Brehl and Jane Morpeth, my editors in the U.S. and U.K., for their help and assistance and, particularly, their patience, and my literary agent, the redoubtable Merrilee Heifetz, and her gang around the world.
As I write this now, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.