How to Talk to Girls at Parties

How to Talk to Girls at Parties was a short story by the great Neil Gaiman, and then a graphic novel, with art by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. It is soon to be a major motion picture, but looking at the cast list I see it has been greatly expanded. Instead, it would have made a better half-hour show. Pity the Twilight Zone or Outer Limits aren't still around.

It's really a one-joke story, but with broader implications if you want to see them. Enn and Vic are two fifteen-year-olds. Vic is the more cocksure of them, and leads Enn to a party. Enn is very shy an inexperienced, but tags along. Vic urges him to just talk to girls.

When they get there the party is in full swing, with strange music Enn has never heard before. Vic immediately connects with the girl who answered the door, Stella, while Enn just kind of wanders around until he finds a room with only one girl in it. He decides to talk to her.

She responds with words, though in English, make no sense. He goes along with it, though, as if she were chatting normally. Later he will meet two more girls who do the same thing. One says that she is a living poem, and three different things at once. The reader will get what's going on before Enn does, as all the girls called themselves "tourists." Vic, who took Stella downstairs, will end up running for his life.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is both a gentle comedy about the foibles of hapless teen-age boys, and a primer on how teen-age boys should treat teen-age girls. It's a slim volume--64 pages, and can be read in one setting. For all the big stuff Gaiman has written, this seems like a throwaway. But a nice one.