The 13 Clocks isn’t really a fairy tale, just as it isn’t really a ghost story. But it feels like a fairy tale, and it takes place in a fairy-tale world. It is short—not too short, just perfectly short. Short enough. When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself only to use those words I needed. I watch Thurber wrap his story tightly in words, while at the same time juggling fabulous words that glitter and gleam, tossing them out like a happy madman, all the time explaining and revealing and baffling with words. It is a miracle. I think you could learn everything you need to know about telling stories from this book.

Listen: it has a prince in it, and a princess. It has the evilest duke ever written. It has Hush and Whisper (and Listen). Happily, it has Hagga, who weeps jewels. Terrifyingly, it has a Todal. And best and most marvelously and improbably of all, it has a Golux, with an indescribable hat, who warns our hero,

“Half the places I have been to, never were. I make things up. Half the things I say are there cannot be found. When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods. I dug myself.”

“But why?”

“I thought the tale of treasure might be true.”

“You said you made it up.”

“I know I did, but then I didn’t know I had. I forget things, too.”

Every tale needs a Golux. Luckily for all of us, this book has one.

There are stories out there where it helps to have an introduction, where you need someone to explain things for you before you begin. An introduction to set the scene, where the introducer shines light into dark places and lets the story shine more brightly, just as a precious stone polished and placed in a fine setting looks better than it might in a dusty corner or glued to a duke’s grimy glove.

The 13 Clocks is not one of those stories. It doesn’t need an introduction. It doesn’t need me. It is like one of Hagga’s jewels of laughter, and likely to dissolve if it is examined too long or too closely.

It’s not a fairy tale. It’s not a poem, it’s not a parable or a fable or a novel or a joke. Truly, I don’t know what The 13 Clocks is, but whatever it is, as someone else said of something else at the top of this introduction, it’s the only one there ever was.

This introduction was originally written for the 2008 New York Review of Books edition of James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks.

Votan and Other Novels by John James

The hardest part of being a writer, particularly being someone who writes fiction for a living, is that it makes it harder to reread a book you loved. The more you know about the mechanics of fiction, the craft of writing, the way a story is put together, the way words work in sequence to create effects, the harder it is to go back to books that changed you when you were younger. You can see the joins, the rough edges, the clumsy sentences, the paper-thin people. The more you know, the harder it is to appreciate the things that once gave you joy.