This is Not a Story, But About One - amende honorable to Neil Gaiman!

Sir, I have boycotted you because of the horror I had of that dream of that other woman in "The Problem of Susan".*

As you know, I wrote (or started writing) my own Susan fic in polemics to yours.

Meaning that Susan will NOT rest either in denial nor even doubt.

But, I can no longer consider you a bad writer.

Yesterday I left off Stardust (French Translation) at p.116, and today I took it up again same library, at about 12:00, finishing at about 15:00.

Tolkien, CSL, Lloyd Alexander have found a colleague in my imagination, and you are closer to them, and to me, even than Ursula Kroeber LeGuin.

I have NOT been finding anything comparable since my teens, until I found your book.

Even including a French novelist, who seems a bit inspired by you, but going from you to him would be like going from Rose Period to Guernica. L'Étrange Monde de Là-Bas is a bit like a bête noire to me - I suppose a bit what Voyage to Arcturus was to CSL. But your book is like a volume from a library which was lost and has been put back into the shelf.

My spontaneous impression of the seven brothers was a bit like "sons of Feanor meet Family Addams". And the overall plot was a bit like "Beren and Luthien - subverted". Congratulations.

It was written a year in which I was having some difficulties. 5th of February 1998, I had had to defend myself against a policeman taking me off to see shrinks on order of a doctor who was more fanatical than some shrinks I have seen. He got ten cm long and perhaps one cm deep (or more superficial) on the hip, and I got, first a month in detention, then a trial at which I was acquitted on grounds of "putative defense", a ground I considered and consider inadequate, then a few days on an escape route, then a new detention, some months longer, a new trial and 3 and a half years, including what I had already done in detention - whereof I served two thirds.

So, glad that someone was doing sth good that year and that I came to enjoy it.

I am not sure how you like a now defunct Ziggy Stardust, but if the title was in honour of him**, I think his best aesthetic vein, the one I enjoyed when seeing Labyrinth, has been very amply honoured therein.

I suppose Stormfold is an Elven Kingdom - according to Robert Kirk and Andrew Lang, not according to the Firstborn of Silmarillion.

But it owes sth to Tacitus and to Lemony Snicket, as well.

This is not meant as an introduction for those who haven't read Stardust, I might write sth like that in French for my pop culture blog gmb1lou. It is just to notify you, you are definitely no longer on my boycott list!***

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Wednesday after
II Lord's Day in Lent
24.II.2016

* According to reports I found so gross I did not actually read your story. ** Not meaning it have no bearing on the story, of course! *** Barring obedience to the Church, should you come to the Index, but I hope that will not be the case.

It seems this post is n° 200 of the published ones on this blog, meaning The Boy Who Made the Stars came as n° 199 - a fine confirmation that Christ indeed came 5199 after Creation!/HGL