This third collection of short fiction by Gaiman includes previously published pieces of short fiction--stories, verse, and a Doctor Who story written for the series' fiftieth anniversary (Nothing o'clock). There is also "Black Dog," a new tale that revisits the world of his novel American Gods. The collection explores the masks we all wear and the people we are beneath them to reveal our vulnerabilities and our truest selves. Horror and ghosts stories, science fiction and fairy tales, fabulism and poetry explore the realm of experience and emotion. In "Adventure Story"--a thematic companion to The Ocean at the End of the Lane--Gaiman ponders death and the way people take their stories with them when they die. His social media experience "A Calendar of Tales" are short takes inspired by replies to fan tweets about the months of the year--stories of pirates and the March winds, an igloo made of books, and a Mother's Day card that portends disturbances in the universe. Gaiman offers his own spin on Sherlock Holmes in his award-nominated mystery tale "The Case of Death and Honey". And "Click-Clack the Rattlebag" explains the creaks and clatter we hear when we're all alone in the darkness.

Between 1924 and the fall of communism in 1991, hundreds of millions of visitors paid their respects to the embalmed body of Lenin and, later, that of Stalin. Professor Ilya Zbarsky - son of Boris Zbarsky who, with professor Vladimir Vorobiov, mummified Lenin two months after his death - reveals the extraordinary adventure of his family and of those who worked in the mausoleum laboratory, the sole purpose of which was to maintain the body of the Soviet founder in perpetuity. This they achieved by plunging him into a secret solution based on glycerine and potassium acetate. Their story, unthinkable save in a totalitarian regime, is also that of the burgeoning Soviet Union and of the privileged few who, disregarding Stalin and his growing anti-Semitic paranoia, believed that working in the shadows of the mausoleum would protect them forever. Abandoned by the State since 1991, the laboratory survives today through the patronage of the nouveaux riches and the Russian mafia dynasties. Archival and contemporary photographs reinforce the symbolic dimension of this page of history. Now, eighty years after the October Revolution, Boris Yeltsin has requested a referendum to decide the future of Lenin's embalmed remains.