Neil Gaiman’s likely stories - 2016

 A miniseries of four episodes. Honestly quite boring because at the end you’re just there asking yourself What? That’s the end? What does it mean?  I would not see these episodes ever again.

All episodes include bits where Neil Gaiman himself talks about dreams, nightmares and stories.

1. Foreign parts.

Simon Powers likes to be alone, even prefers masturbating to sex. He feels bad, goes to a doctor, has a venereal disease that they don’t know. He’s given some medicine. 

First week, he says that he feels different, like he’s been taken over by someone else, like the lower part of his body doesn’t belong to him anymore. 

Two weeks, he’s a different person, confident, wanting to travel and meet people. The doctor though feels lonelier and his marriage is ending. 

Simon… George Mackay

…

I don’t know, it ended so abruptly, no explanation, no meaning, I was left thinking: “what did I just see?”

Also : “why did I see it?”

2. Feeders and eaters.

Again, I don’t know what I saw.

Joyce works in a bar, night shift, not much people around. Eddie comes in, she knew him a long time ago. 

He tells her a strange story. He once rented a room and next door there was old Miss Effie Corvier, and he liked her from the start. One day the house cat went missing, and Eddie found Effie in bed, extremely hungry. She told him to get her some fresh, raw meat, and she ate it right out of the packet. She was well again and they spent more time together. One night he was woken by the cat’s loud noises. He found the poor thing in Effie’s room. He was alive, but his back was open and the flesh missing, Eddie could see the ribcage. Eddie killed it out of pity, but when she saw Eddie taking the cat’s body away she went desperate, saying the cat was her way of keeping her meat fresh, that she didn’t know what to do now… and it ends, with Eddie going away with a girl, and Joyce the ‘long story’ of a new customer…

It seems to me old Effie had done something to the cat so that he wouldn’t die, and maybe regenerate quickly, but it was torture for the poor thing :(

3. Closing time.

Some people talk about ghosts and ghost stories and one of them (Johnny Vegas) tells them of something that happened when he was 9 years old. He met three boys in the woods, and went to an isolated little old house. They dared him to knock and he did, they dared him to go in but he said instead that he’d done his part, and now he dared them to go in, and they did, the door already opened by itself. 

I don’t know, I didn’t understand the ending, I think the three boys disappeared, and nobody heard from them again. He saw something inside but I don’t know what. An old man confirmed his story, saying it was all true, amd that two of the kids died, and one escaped and disappeared.

Was that him? Is that how he knows about it? 

4. Looking for the girl.

A famous photographer gives an interview to Miranda, and then he tells her of how he became a photographer, of his muse Charlotte. He saw a picture when he was 19, and kept looking for her in magazines. Over the years he saw again her pictures, under different names, always 19, but nobody ever had an address for her. Finally he inherited a photographer studio and she showed up to have her pictures taken, and again she said she was 19, and then she vanished again. His pictures were published, and he kept working, always considering Charlotte his muse. 

…