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Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions

Neil Gaiman
Buy on Amazon Kindle
fantasy dark fantasy / magical realism past tense third limited POV ~404 pp high worldbuilding
features extracted 2026-04-12

Vibe

grotesque absurdist melancholic

A fantasy. Expect rich worldbuilding, epic scope. Ends on an unresolved note. Contains notable violence, sexual content.

Style Fingerprint

Prose density 45
sparsedense
Pacing 60
slow burnpropulsive
Emotional tone 30
darkhopeful
Worldbuilding 85
minimalmaximal
Char / plot 40
character-drivenplot-driven
Interiority 50
externalintrospective
Ending 20
unresolvedcathartic
Stakes 90
intimateepic

Content

Violence 90%
noneextreme
Sexual content 60%
noneexplicit
Humor 40%
seriouscomedic
Romance 30%
nonecentral
Speculative hardness soft/vibes → hard sci-fi / rigorous magic

Structure & Cast

Structure
Word count100,913
Page count~404 pp
Prologue
Epilogue
Tensepast
Cast & World
POVthird limited

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