Free The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman Page A

with the attitude that went along with it—an attitude that implied that these tales no longer had anything to do with us. That they were dead cold things, which would submit without resistance to dissection, that could be held up to the light and inspected from every angle, and would give up their secrets without resistance.
    Most of the people at the conference were more than willing to pay lip service to the theory of fairy tales as stories that had begun as entertainments that adults told adults, but became children’s stories when they went out of fashion (much as, in Professor Tolkien’s analogy, the unwanted and unfashionable furniture was moved into the nursery: it was not that it hadbeen intended to be children’s furniture, it was just that the adults did not want it any longer). “Why do you write with myths and with fairy tales?” one of them asked me.
    â€œBecause they have power,” I explained, and watched the students and academics nod doubtfully. They were willing to allow that it might be true, as an academic exercise. They didn’t believe it.
    The next morning I was meant to make a formal address on the subject of myth and fairy tales. And when the time came, I threw away my notes, and, instead of lecturing them, I read them a story.
    It was a retelling of the story of Snow White, from the point of view of the wicked queen. It asked questions like, “What kind of a prince comes across the dead body of a girl in a glass coffin and announces that he is in love and will be taking the body back to his castle?” and for that matter, “What kind of a girl has skin as white as snow, hair as black as coal, lips as red as blood, and can lie, as if dead, for a long time?” We realize, listening to the story, that the wicked queen was not wicked: she simply did not go far enough; and we also realize, as the queen is imprisoned inside a kiln, about to be roasted for the midwinter feast, that stories are told by survivors. *
    It is one of the strongest pieces of fiction I’ve written. If you read it on your own, it can be disturbing. To have it read to you by an author on a podium, first thing in the morning, during a conference on fairy tales, must on reflection have been, for the listeners, a rather extreme experience, like taking a gulp of something they thought was coffee, and finding that someone had laced it with wasabi, or with blood.
    At the end of a story that was, after all, just “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” an audience of several dozen people lookedpale and troubled, like people coming off a roller coaster or like sailors recently returned to land.
    â€œAs I said, these stories have power,” I told them as I finished. This time they seemed far more inclined to believe me.
    VI
    ALL TOO OFTEN I write to find out what I think about a subject, not because I already know.
    My next novel will be, for me, a way of trying to pin down myths—modern myths, and the old myths, together, on the huge and puzzling canvas that is the North American continent.
    It has a working title of American Gods (which is not what the book will be called, but what it is about).
    It’s about the gods that people brought with them as they came here from distant lands; it’s about the new gods, of car crash and telephone and People magazine, of Internet and airplane, of freeway and mortuary; it’s about the forgotten gods, who were here before Man, the gods of Buffalo and Passenger Pigeon, gods that sleep, forgotten.
    All the myths I care about, or have cared about, will be in there, but there in order to try and make sense of the myths that make America.
    I have lived here for six years, and I still do not understand it: a strange collection of homegrown myths and beliefs, the ways that America explains itself to itself.
    Maybe I’ll make an awful mess of it all, but I can’t say that worries me as badly as I think it ought to. I look forward