Although I love most of Neil Gaiman's work, I was disappointed by this collection of short stories selected by him. According to the introduction, the theme of the collection was supposed to be stories that keep you saying "and then what happened?" right until the end, but unfortunately most of the stories didn't live up to this theme. Most of the stories seemed to be generally creepy/scary themed, but failed to be actually scary, and also failed to capture much of my interest. Very few kept me wondering "and then what happened" till the end, and in some cases I reached the end and was much more likely to say "huh? what just happened?" In fact, since I was generally reading this book in bed, many of the stories failed so completely to keep me interested that I fell asleep in the middle of reading them - sometimes several times before even finishing the one story - which seems like a spectacular fail of the collection's theme.

Overall I was disappointed by the story selection and will be giving my copy of this book to a charity store next time I donate. I'll stick to stories Mr. Gaiman has actually written in the future.