Smoke and mirrors: short fictions and illusions

An elderly widow finds the Holy Grail beneath an old fur coat in a second hand store...A stray cat fights and refights a nightly battle to protet his adoptive family from an unimaginable evil...A young couple receives a wedding gift that will reveal a chilling alternate history of their marriage...Beneath a bridge by the railroad tracks, a frightened little boy bargains for his life with a most persistent troll...Such miraculous inventions and more await within Neil Gaiman's first collection of short fiction. In his capable hands, magic is no mere illusion, but a powerful means to reveal the nature of our humanity obscured in the smoke of our fears and anxieties...and reflected in the funhouse mirrors of our dreams.