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Troll Bridge

This story was nominated for a 1994 World Fantasy Award, although it didn't win. It was written for Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's Snow White, Blood Red, an anthology of retellings of fairy tales for adults. I chose the tale of "The Three Billy Goats Gruff". Had Gene Wolfe, one of my favourite writers (and, it occurs to me now, another person who hid a story in an introduction), not taken the title many years earlier, I would have called it "Trip Trap".

Don't Ask Jack

Lisa Snellings is a remarkable sculptor. This was written about the first of her sculptures I saw and fell in love with: a demonic jack-in-the-box. She gave me a copy of it and has promised me the original in her will, she says. Each of her sculptures is like a story, frozen in wood or plaster. (There is one on my mantelpiece of a winged girl in a cage offering passersby a feather from her wings while her captor sleeps; I suspect that this one is a novel. We'll see.)