by Rosamund Hodge

“I am Death, and all mortals are the same to me.”

Title: Good Night, Sweet Prince
Author: Rosamund Hodge
Publisher: Tumblr?
Book: short fiction
Genre:
Found: The Hanging Garden
Rating: 3 Voodoos

Stop struggling and listen: Once upon a time, there was a prince who wanted to marry Death.

You already know this won’t end well.

-Goodreads

So I was casually checking Rosamond Hodge’s Goodreads page the other day and I found all these short stories I hadn’t realised existed. What the heck?! Where have I been??

They can be read on the The Hanging Garden page on tumblr, you can follow this link HERE.

This was a strange story, but sometimes you need to go away and think about stories to actually understand them. This one is circular, but not quite. You can’t go straight from the end to the start again, but it’s an almost thing. It doesn’t have a happy ending either, it’s almost bittersweet. Yay! My favourite thing! (please note: NOT SARCASM. Mostly…)

This is about a spoilt prince who sees a beautiful woman and is determined to wed her. It’s a little bit alarming – he was going to have her no matter what, poor woman. But in the end the joke was on him for she was DEATH! I can’t guarantee that I’ve taken this story the way you’re meant to – Many people fear death but I do not. I’m fascinated by stories portraying death as a character, but not in what I would think of as a morbid way, more of an abstract way. I think perhaps it has something to do with the Death in Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series. There, Death is called Shadow-Lover in a song and it just sounded so beautiful and sad.

I like how this was written, as though it was a tale being told to somebody, interspersed with conversations Death is having with someone. It also suddenly changes from he and she to you and I, but that’s for story type reasons and I can’t tell you more on that, just that it’s a tiny little bit clever. It’s also really very short which is a shame.
But it’s always great to read a little something nice.