Neil gaiman books in order

(Full name Neil Richard Gaiman) English novelist, short-story writer, essayist, nonfiction writer, editor, screenwriter, playwright, graphic novelist, comic book writer, and author of picture books and juvenile fiction.

The following entry presents an overview of Gaiman's career through 2004.

INTRODUCTION

Gaiman is a central figure in the emergence of the "graphic novel," a genre which combines novelistic storylines with comic book graphics. He has won numerous awards for his best-selling, critically acclaimed comic books and novels that combine elements of science fiction, horror, dark fantasy, ancient mythology, and biblical allegory. However, though many of his previous works have appealed to young adult audiences, in 1997, Gaiman released his first foray into the genre of children's literature—the picture book The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (1997). Gaiman continued his partnership with illustrator Dave McKean in two subsequent children's works, the Gothic juvenile novel Coraline (2002) and the eerie picture book The Wolves in the Walls (2003). In all three works, Gaiman creates fantastic worlds filled with dangers and amusements, developing child protagonists who utilize courage and common sense to sidestep mishaps that adults seem unable to avoid.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Gaiman was born November 10, 1960, in Portchester, England. His father owned a vitamin-pill factory, and his mother was a pharmacist. As a child, Gaiman was an avid reader and developed a passion for comic books. He graduated from the Whitgift School in 1977 and began working as a freelance writer and journalist in London. Although his fervor for comic books had declined during his adolescence, the emergence of graphic novels in the mid-1980s re-fueled his ardor for the genre. In 1987 he published his first comic book, Violent Cases, illustrated by Dave McKean. Shortly thereafter, Gaiman began working for DC Comics, the publishers of Batman and Superman. DC allowed Gaiman to completely reinvent one of their more obscure characters, the Sandman, and Gaiman's resulting Sandman series became one of the most award-winning and acclaimed comic book series of all time. Gaiman has since authored numerous comics, graphic novels, short stories, novels, and—beginning with The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish—children's books. In 1996 he wrote a six-part television series for the BBC, Neverwhere, which he later adapted into a full-length novel. In 2004 Gaiman released his first work ever for Marvel Comics, 1602, which became the best-selling comic book of 2004. 2005 saw the premiere of Mirrormask, a film that Gaiman wrote for the Jim Henson Company, which was designed and directed by Dave McKean. Gaiman served as Chair of the Soci-ety of Comic Strip Illustrators from 1988 to 1990 and sits on the advisory board of the International Museum of Cartoon Art. He is also a major contributor and active fundraiser for the Comic Legal Defense Fund, an anti-censorship lobbying organization. Gaiman lives in Minnesota with his wife and three children.

MAJOR WORKS

Gaiman originally came to prominence among young adult audiences with DC Comics' Sandman series, comprised of seventy-five issues, which were originally published as individual comic books between 1988 and 1996 and republished in ten multi-volume graphic novels. The eponymous hero of the Sandman series—who is variously called Dream, Morpheus, the Lord of the Dreaming, and the Prince of Stories—is a member of a family of seven supernatural beings, known collectively as the Endless, each one representing different states of mind: Death, Delirium, Desire, Destruction, Despair, Destiny, and Dream. The figure of Death is depicted as a good-natured young woman dressed in punk-rock fashion, while Delirium is portrayed as a loquacious girl with green and pink hair who walks around with a pet fish on a leash. The Sandman, Dream, is a scrawny, sallow man with deep sunken eyes and a shock of black hair. Dream rules over The Dreaming, a fantastical realm which humans can enter only when they sleep. The accoutrements necessary to his powers include a pouch of magical sand, a helmet, and a ruby dream jewel. Gaiman informed DC Comics that he wished to end the Sandman series while it was at its height, rather than continuing it indefinitely. He thus describes the death of the Sandman in issue sixty-nine, although the series continued for six more issues before the epic tale was complete. Gaiman has since published several spin-off graphic novels that feature the Sandman but are separate from the storyline of the original series. During and after his run on Sandman, Gaiman further expanded his literary cache by publishing a series of successful novels for older audiences, including Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990), Stardust: Being a Romance within the Realms of Faerie (1998), American Gods (2001), and Anansi Boys (2005).

However, in 1997, Gaiman released his first work specifically directed towards young and beginning readers. The picture book, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, illustrated by Gaiman's longtime comic book collaborator Dave McKean, combines elements of the surreal with the absurdly comic. The narrator, a young boy, trades his father to a friend for two goldfish. When the narrator's mother finds out, the boy begins a quest to reverse the trade—a task made difficult since his friend has already traded the boy's father to another child. To compliment Gaiman's text, McKean's artwork creates an unusual pastiche of line drawings, paintings, and collage. Gaiman's next book for children, Coraline, is a juvenile novel intended for older readers. Written in a style similar to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Coraline creates a fantasy adventure in a bizarre, nonsensical world. The title character is a young girl whose family has just moved into a portion of a house that has been divided into apartments. The other occupants are eclectic but the oddest aspect of the apartment is a locked door that, when opened, reveals a solid brick wall. One day, a bored Coraline finds a way to unlock the door and is surprised to encounter an apartment similar to her own. She enters the apartment and finds a mirror-world complete with doppelgangers of her mother and father, only these versions of her parents have buttons for eyes. The "other" mother promises Coraline anything she wishes, but Coraline soon discovers a sinister element in the parallel apartment and chooses to return home, only to find that the "other" mother has kidnapped her real parents. With the help of an equivocating feline and the ghosts of children previously trapped by the "other" mother, Coraline attempts to rescue her parents and defeat her maternal nemesis. Gaiman blends the scary, fantasy world of Coraline with the silliness of The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish in his second picture book, The Wolves in the Walls. The protagonist, Lucy, warns her parents that there are wolves living in the walls of their house and that the creatures are trying to get out. Her parents' disbelief turns to helplessness when the wolves do escape and chase the family out of their home. The family lives in the garden until Lucy decides to fight back and reclaim their house.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Critical response to Gaiman's literature for children has been largely positive. Reviewers have commented that Gaiman's proficiency with the conventions of multiple literary mediums has enabled him to reject standard genre rules and create unique situations for his child protagonists. Gaiman's continuing collaboration with artist Dave McKean has also been highly applauded; critics have contended that McKean's illustrations skillfully add to the absurdity and humor of Gaiman's texts. Some have questioned whether the mildly scary themes present in Coraline and The Wolves in the Walls are appropriate for young readers, but both works have been widely embraced by children and librarians alike. Commentators have noted Gaiman's frequent employment of fantasy and fairy tale elements in his children's books, often comparing his texts with the works of Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, and Philip Pullman. Iain Emsley has argued that, in their collaborations, "Gaiman and McKean have successfully resurrected the nonsense form and recreated it for a modern audience. They have taken what had seemed to be a forgotten part of children's literary heritage and remade it in their own image, capable of carrying a modern story with its own considerable weight."

AWARDS

Gaiman's Sandman series was awarded nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, including the award for best writer four times, and three Harvey Awards. Sandman issue 19 took the 1991 World Fantasy Award for best short story, making it the first comic ever to be awarded a literary award. Gaiman won the Mythopoeic Award for best novel for adults for Stardust and was awarded the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Horror Writers Association award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award for American Gods. The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish was chosen by Newsweek for their list of best children's books of 1997, and Coraline received the Elizabeth Burr/Worzalla Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Hugo Award, and the Nebula Award. Coraline was also nominated for the Prix Tam Tam Award. The New York Times named The Wolves in the Walls one of the best illustrated books of 2003, and that same year, Gaiman's Sandman: Endless Nights (2003) became the first graphic novel to ever appear on the New York Times bestseller list.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Violent Cases [illustrations by Dave McKean] (graphic novel) 1987

Don't Panic: The Official "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" Companion (nonfiction) 1988; revised with David K. Dickson and republished as Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," 1993

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch [with Terry Pratchett] (novel) 1990

The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes [illustrations by Sam Keith and Mike Dringenberg; originally published in The Sandman, issues 1-8 in 1988-1989] (graphic novel) 1990

The Sandman: The Doll's House [illustrations by Chris Bachalo and Mike Dringenberg; originally published in The Sandman, issues 9-16 in 1989-1990] (graphic novel) 1990

The Sandman: Dream Country [illustrations by Kelley Jones and Colleen Doran; originally published in The Sandman, issues 17-20 in 1990] (graphic novel) 1991

The Sandman: Season of Mists [illustrations by Kelley Jones, Mike Dringenberg, and Matt Wagner; originally published in The Sandman, issues 21-28 in 1990-1991] (graphic novel) 1992

Signal to Noise [illustrations by Dave McKean] (graphic novel) 1992; adapted as a radio play, 1996

∗Angels and Visitations: A Miscellany (short stories) 1993

The Books of Magic [illustrations by John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess, and Paul Johnson; originally published in four issues in 1990-1991] (graphic novel) 1993

The Sandman: Fables and Reflections [illustrations by Bryan Talbot, Stan Woch, Duncan Eagleson, and Jill Thompson; originally published in The Sandman, issues 29-31, 38-40, 50 in 1991-1993] (graphic novel) 1993

The Sandman: A Game of You [illustrations by Shawn McManus, Colleen Doran, and Bryan Talbot; originally published in The Sandman, issues 32-37 in 1991-1992] (graphic novel) 1993

Death: The High Cost of Living [illustrations by Chris Bachalo and Mark Buckingham; originally published in three issues in 1993] (graphic novel) 1994

The Sandman: Brief Lives [illustrations by Jill Thompson; originally published in The Sandman, issues 41-49 in 1992-1993] (graphic novel) 1994

Snow, Glass, Apples (radio play) 1994; revised as Snow Glass Apples: A Play for Voices, 2002

The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch: A Romance [illustrations by Dave McKean] (graphic novel) 1994

The Sandman: World's End [illustrations by Bryan Talbot, Michael Zulli, Shea Anton Pensa, and Gary Amano; originally published in The Sandman, issues 51-56 in 1993] (graphic novel) 1995

Neverwhere (screenplay) 1996; adapted as a novel, 1997

The Sandman: Book of Dreams [editor; with Edward E. Kramer] (short stories) 1996

The Sandman: The Kindly Ones [illustrations by Marc Hempel, Richard Case, D'Israeli, Teddy Kristiansen, Blyn Dillon, Charles Vess, Dean Ormston, and Devin Nowlan; originally published in The Sandman, issues 57-69 in 1994-1995] (graphic novel) 1996

The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish [illustrations by Dave McKean] (picture book) 1997

Death: The Time of Your Life [illustrations by Chris Bachalo, Mark Pennington, and Mark Buckingham; originally published in three issues in 1996] (graphic novel) 1997

The Sandman: The Wake [illustrations by Michael Zulli, Jon J. Muth, Bryan Talbot, John Ridgway, and Charles Vess; originally published in The Sandman, issues 70-75 in 1995-1996] (graphic novel) 1997

Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions (short stories) 1998

Stardust: Being a Romance within the Realms of Faerie [illustrations by Charles Vess; originally published in four parts in 1997-1998] (novel) 1998

Princess Mononoke [adaptor; from the Japanese screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki] (screenplay) 1999

Sandman: The Dream Hunters [illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano] (graphic novel) 1999

American Gods (novel) 2001

Coraline [illustrations by Dave McKean] (juvenile fiction) 2002

Murder Mysteries [illustrations by P. Craig Russell] (graphic novel) 2002

The Sandman: Endless Nights [illustrations by Glenn Fabry, Milo Manara, Miguelanxo Prado, Frank Quitely, P. Craig Russell, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Barron Storey] (graphic novel) 2003

The Wolves in the Walls [illustrations by Dave McKean] (picture book) 2003

1602 [illustrations by Andy Kubert; originally published in eight issues in 2003-2004] (graphic novel) 2004

Anansi Boys (novel) 2005

Mirrormask (screenplay) 2005

∗This work was later expanded and republished as Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions in 1998.

AUTHOR COMMENTARY

Neil Gaiman and Heidi Henneman (interview date 2003)

SOURCE: Gaiman, Neil, and Heidi Henneman. "Crossing Over: Adult Author Neil Gaiman Enters the World of Children's Books." BookPage (online magazine) (2003).

[In the following interview, Gaiman discusses the impetus behind his children's book The Wolves in the Walls and the difficulties he had writing the book.]

His kids made him do it—or at least inspired him to do it. That's how British author Neil Gaiman claims he began writing stories for young readers. "The thing about children's books that many people don't understand is that beloved children's books are read not once, but many times," he says.

The award-winning author of the adult novels American Gods and Neverwhere, as well as the Sandman graphic novel series, Gaiman learned this lesson about children's books by reading to his own kids. When his son was young, he loved a book called Catch the Red Bus, and Gaiman spent night after night reading the story to the boy, often more than once at a sitting. The repetition taught Gaiman that children's books should be fun—not just for kids, but for adults as well.

Gaiman has written two previous children's titles, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and Coraline, a New York Times bestseller. His new book, The Wolves in the Walls, is a quirky, hilarious tale that's fun to read—over and over.

The concept for Wolves came from the author's young daughter, who had a bad dream one night. "She was convinced there were wolves in the walls," says Gaiman, "and as she described them to me, I immediately knew that I would steal the idea for a book." Not long after, he sat down and wrote the first draft of the story. "I didn't like it at all," says Gaiman. Instead of rewriting it, however, he decided to abandon it. After about eight months, he tried once more, but again, he didn't like it, and again, he abandoned the story. Another eight months passed. Then one night, Gaiman suddenly woke up in bed and thought, "When the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over!" This, apparently, was just the idea he needed to bring the book to life. That afternoon, he wrote the entire story, to perfection. "It took me one afternoon to write it," says Gaiman, "but also two-and-a-half years."

Shortly thereafter, Gaiman began reading the story at signings for his adult books, and the reception was overwhelmingly positive. "I was astonished at how incredibly popular a short story for children was to adults," says Gaiman. He then passed the story along to Dave McKean, his long-time collaborator and the illustrator of Coraline and the Sandman series.

McKean's shadowy, atmospheric pictures, which mix drawings and photographic images to create a collage-like effect, are the perfect match for Gaiman's spooky yet humorous story. The heroine, Lucy, is sure she hears the scurrying of furry beasts behind the walls. When the wolves finally burst forth, they drive Lucy, her parents and her brother out of the house and into the garden. McKean's ingenious illustrations bring the wild and wacky animals to life, as they make themselves at home, dressing up in Lucy's father's clothes, turning on the telly and consuming the family's stash of strawberry jam.

"Since I had stolen the idea from my daughter, I thought it was only fair to have some element of [McKean's] family in the book as well," says Gaiman. This came in the form of a pig-puppet that McKean's son had treasured. "Some kids have blankets", recalls Gaiman, "but this one had a pig-puppet, and his parents could never get it away from him long enough to even wash it." Thus, in the book Lucy is the proud owner of a pig-puppet. The result: a thoroughly inspired Gaiman-McKean family production.

Gaiman's next project is a "proper, honest-to-goodness picture book" entitled Crazy Hair. It's a Dr. Seuss-type story, and he admits that it's a bit "goofy."

Yet it's this very quirkiness that makes Gaiman's work so appealing. "There's a strange joy in doing these children's books," he says, "and getting into not only children's heads, but the heads of their parents as well." With The Wolves in the Walls, Gaiman does both.

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Iain Emsley (essay date October 2003)

SOURCE: Emsley, Iain. "The Walls Have Ears." January Magazine (online magazine) (October 2003).

[In the following essay, Emsley examines Gaiman's The Wolves in the Walls and Coraline in regards to their position in the children's fantasy canon. Emsley notes that The Wolves in the Walls and Coraline share many thematic elements with C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.]

In recent years, we have seen the growth of children's fantasy, the increasing debates about its purpose (if any) and also the internal debates with literary ancestors, particularly in the case of Philip Pullman's attacks on C. S. Lewis' Narnia which have seen a firm attempt at rebuttal in G. P. Taylor's Shadowmancer. Yet modern children's fantasy has taken a broadly similar line in its form, namely the use of secondary worlds.

Throughout his career, Neil Gaiman has demonstrated himself as a superb teller of tales, unconcerned about crossing supposed boundaries in his graphic novels and earlier writings. In interviews he has stated that he is more concerned with the development of a story rather than worrying about what conventions it needs, following the idea that genres are only guidelines not rules, as shown in American Gods where he casually drops short stories into the main novel, so reinforcing the narrative flow. He is also brilliant at reusing for-gotten forms, such as the fairy tale in Stardust or reflecting upon what traditional children's literature is in Coraline. He shows himself to be a literary archaeologist and a supreme experimenter in form in his most recent book, Wolves in the Walls. He and Dave McKean have created a melange of nonsense and cautionary tales, where there is precious little moralizing but a real sense of a truth being portrayed and worked out in a humorous fashion. There is a sense of humor and joy that pervades the book as well as redeveloping other forms and modes.

The idea for Wolves in the Walls came from a nightmare that Gaiman's youngest daughter, Maddy, had where she could hear the wolves scrabbling around in the wall and she related this to her father. This was followed by her father telling her several tales where they were caught by the wolves but managed to escape, this enabling Maddy to cope with the terror initiated by the nightmare. After several false starts, Gaiman finally created the current book in tandem with Dave McKean. Through the novel, Gaiman alludes to the cautionary tale of the little boy who cried wolf with Lucy's repeated warnings about the wolves. Even the adults mention that this bodes ill for them but they fail to heed the warning. Lucy takes the consequences of this ignorance at face value and so turns the tables on the wolves but the ending is still open. The motive for taking action is uniquely childlike: it is the need to rescue her favorite bedtime toy that motivates Lucy to retake the house for the family, whereas the parents are considering moving to new pastures.

Acknowledging Lewis Carroll as an influence, Gaiman uses the nonsense tradition in his illustrated books, drawing from the absurdities in wonderland rather than the use of a secondary world. Gaiman and Dave McKean renew nonsense for an audience seemingly unfamiliar with the mode through the close mixture of words and images. Since the 1950s, secondary worlds in the vein of Tolkien and Lewis have dominated children's fantasy but Gaiman has created a wonderful story which draws from traditional nonsense in the vein of Lear and Lewis Carroll.

Dave McKean, Gaiman's long time collaborator in a multitude of projects, has illustrated the book and the words and images work to counterbalance each other, bringing different aspects to life in the story in the best tradition of illustrated novels, such as Tenniels or Peakes illustrations in Alice in Wonderland. McKean's illustrations develop the mood of the novel, moving from intensely fun and carnivalesque to the glowering and stormy, reacting with Gaiman's prose with the ease that comes from their long term creative relationship. Rather than making up portmanteau words like Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll, they create a nonsense that works with both text and image, such as the charming view of the wolves sliding down the banisters wearing the family's clothes or the images of ice cream and buns strewn all over the page when the wolves are finally evicted. In this way, they further delight the reader whilst removing the seriousness of the book, allowing it to be read as a harmless entertainment or a subversion of the idea of parental omniscience.

There is also a touch of the cautionary tale in Wolves in the Walls. Cautionary tales often work by repetition about the terrible fate that awaits the disobedient child, an often overstated accident or lingering death, they are not strictly didactic in terms of exhorting the reader towards a Christian life but they do center around the child not taking heed of warnings. Although not strictly fantasy, they do draw from the nonsense tradition of Edward Lear to highlight a sensible point in a humorous fashion that is accessible to children but safe for adults.

In Coraline, Gaiman and McKean revisited this restoration of the family theme with the abduction of Coraline's family by her other mother and so she has to visit the otherworld to rescue them, in the meanwhile liberating the three other spirits held in the marbles. These tales only begin when the central child is ignored by the parental figures. The father is swapped because he is ignoring the child to read his paper and Coraline is set a series of nonsensical tasks to keep her out of her parent's way while they work.

In Wolves in the Walls, Lucy continually warns her parents and brother of what is happening but she is silenced and ignored, leading to the tragedy which she alone can save them from. The central child is commonly pushed to the side of the family but, in contrast to most children's fantasy, Lucy and Coraline work to restore the family's fortunes and coherence in each book but do not warn them of the ensuing trouble. This novel is about the lack of communication between the various family members, a sub-theme of Coraline as well.

The reader knows that these stories are nonsense but cannot help empathizing with Lucy, Coraline or the unnamed narrator. With Lucy, the reader hears the hatching plots as the wolves prepare to come from their hiding places and we see the mayhem that they cause with their party and general naughtiness, but we know (as do the adults) that wolves cannot live in the walls. Pullman and Rowling have utilized alternate worlds to reflect upon our realities, Gaiman has gone back to the beginning of identifiable children's fantasy, in particular Lewis Carroll, to create a world which is recognizable to children. In Coraline, he took Alice in Wonderland and recreated it in his own image, mixing it with Narnia and H. P. Lovecraft, thus ensuring that it would be read as a modern work. Wolves in the Walls takes the nonsense aspect of Wonderland and develops it with talking puppets and the party that the wolves have. Whereas Carroll took general foibles of society and played with them, Gaiman looks at the closer home life and pulls out the slightly more ridiculous aspects. As in other children's fantasy novels, the parents are removed from the central role but neatly, this plot (and their previous children's novels) involves the child going on a hunt to resituate them in the house, to recreate the family status quo. The quest is not one where the child needs to recreate her own world but to ensure that the family is reconstituted. In many ways, we can see how the authors see their own families and the paternal role through the recent books which have been marketed towards the children's market. The father has moved closer to the family as the books have gone on.

In Coraline, Gaiman reflects upon his own childhood reading, especially Alice and Narnia. When Coraline goes through the door into the other house, she is taking the journey through the common device of the portal into the other world (a clear homage to C. S. Lewis' Narnia). In Coraline, this is the connecting door that during the day has a wall behind it. This is a common way of traveling between worlds because it is at once a natural object but it can clearly go both ways and allow for easy return. It also anchors the portal into the real world and makes it realistic for the reader. Once Coraline goes into the other house, Gaiman delivers a clear homage to Through the Looking-Glass via its use of the game motif (in Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is caught in a giant game of chess, whereas Coraline becomes involved in a game of hide and seek) and the conceit of mirrors. Coraline's parents are literally trapped in the mirrors and so she has to go behind the mirrors, through the portal to a world which mirrors the real world but is subtly different. The other parents are happy to give her anything that she desires but she cannot explore very far, as she discovers when she goes into the garden and finds herself caught in the mist because, as the cat mentions, the parents have not got around to creating it yet. As Alice grows up when she moves through the portals, so does Coraline. Pushing against these boundaries, Coraline comes into contact with three spirits who call for her help. During the ensuing hunt, Coraline is offered anything that she wants but she declines saying that she doesn't want everything as this would get boring. It is at this point that Gaiman takes issue with his influences in late 19th-century and C. S. Lewis. Whereas Carroll and Lewis have a moralizing tone to their writing, Coraline has no moral tone. She grows and has moments of wisdom but she comes through at the conclusion as still being the same child that she was. What also comes through is that the cult of the childhood has changed subtly in to the cult of the family. The emphasis is not on the child or the child fixation but on the family and restoring the family.

Gaiman shows that he can ably utilize form and mode to an extent rarely seen. Wolves in the Walls is a short book, coming in at barely 2000 words, but it should not be taken as slight. The prose is deliciously entertaining, creeping and crumpling along with the imagery whereas Coraline 's flat prose masks the danger that the title character is heading towards. The tales are aware of their forebears but manage to develop their own voices and styles while exploring the conventions of structures and themes.

Wolves in the Walls and Coraline are clever exceptions to the majority of children's fantasy in that they deal with the basics, rather than dealing with the immense issues of His Dark Materials or the social absurdities in Alice in Wonderland. In the current rash of children's writing, Gaiman and McKean have successfully resurrected the nonsense form and recreated it for a modern audience. They have taken what had seemed to be a forgotten part of the children's literary heritage and remade it in their own image, capable of carrying a modern story with its own considerable weight. In the vibrant world of children's fiction, Neil Gaiman has clearly shown that there is still room for experimentation and different ways of telling a story. He has effectively remade his own guidelines for telling a story rather than following any genre rules.

Bruce Allen (essay date 2004)

SOURCE: Allen, Bruce. "The Dreaming of Neil Gaiman." In Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 195, edited by Jeffrey Hunter, pp. 226-33. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2004.

[In the following essay, which originally appeared in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 195, Allen provides a comprehensive overview of Gaiman's career, offering a critical summary of Gaiman's novels, short stories, and comic books.]

THE DREAMING OF NEIL GAIMAN

In a feat of literary legerdemain and metamorphosis that many of his characters and creations might envy, an unassuming Englishman who began his career as a freelance writer edging into the comic book industry has become one of (his adopted country) America's best-loved storytellers.

From a path-breaking graphic novel series through television and film scripts, continuing distinguished work in the comics field, charmingly offbeat children's stories, and—by virtually universal agreement—the finest adult fantasy fiction currently being written, Neil Gaiman has risen steadily to the summit of his profession.

A frequent honored guest at comic book and fantasy conventions (where he's known for his endless patience with autograph-seeking fans), Gaiman also remains prominently in the public eye via a state-of-the-art website () that enables him to "chat" with countless adoring readers. He has socialized with celebrities like rock star Tori Amos (with whom Gaiman has in fact toured), and has collected such prestigious admirers as Norman Mailer—who has memorably proclaimed Gaiman's multivolume graphic novel The Sandman "a comic strip for intellectuals," adding "and I say it's about time."

Gaiman has received numerous accolades, ranging from his designation as Most Collectible Author of 1992 to several Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (including the only one yet given to a single issue of a comic book), and the unprecedented sweep accom-plished by his 2001 fantasy novel American Gods, which won all four of its genre's most coveted prizes: the Hugo, Nebula, Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards.

His books have been translated into many languages, and the illustrated fiction on which he has collaborated with several of the finest contemporary graphic artists is generally credited with having crucially boosted the current boom in adult comics, thanks previously to works like Alan Moore's popular Swamp Thing (an influence graciously acknowledged by Gaiman) and Art Spiegelman's innovative Holocaust tale Maus.

Recent Gaiman projects include an English-language adaptation of the beloved Japanese animated film Princess Mononoke, an agreeably scary children's story The Wolves in the Walls, that has grown-ups sneaking into bookstore children's sections to browse it greedily (I have been one such retrograde adult), and a 2003 continuation of The Sandman, presenting seven lavishly illustrated new stories.

Two of Gaiman's stories, "Snow, Glass, Apples" and "Murder Mysteries" have been adapted for radio performance and are available on audiocassette. His illustrated fantasy tale 1602 has recently been published by Marvel Comics. And this year will bring a feature film scripted by Gaiman, Mirror Mask, produced by Jim Henson Studios and directed by its author's longtime illustrator Dave McKean.

And the beat goes on. Shock radio personality Howard Stern's claim to the title "King of All Media" notwithstanding, there's constantly increasing evidence that Gaiman's seemingly tireless creative energy and versatility, and his high visibility, have placed him somewhere very near the epicenter of contemporary popular culture.

Neil Gaiman was born in 1960 in Portchester, England. Though his family is Jewish, Neil was raised in a manner that seems to have been neither Orthodox nor orthodox, by supportive parents who were themselves accomplished professionals (his father a businessman, his mother a pharmacist).

In interviews, Gaiman routinely refers to himself as "the kid with a book," perpetually stealing moments to indulge his quickly discovered love of fantasy, adventure, and supernatural fiction. His mother strongly encouraged this passion for reading, which came to encompass not only landmark works like J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast and their many imitations, but also the work of genre writers less commonly detected by literary-critical radar—such as thriller writer Edgar Wallace, the polymathic G. K. Chesterton, Hope Mirrlees, Lord Dunsany, and the American fantasist whom Gaiman names his favorite such author, Virginia novelist James Branch Cabell.

The ambition to emulate his favorites and become a writer himself was thus implanted early in young Neil, and after graduating from public school, he decided against committing to higher formal education and began working as a freelance journalist. Commissions for miscellaneous articles and interviews, successfully carried out throughout the early 1980s, led him to place work in such top-of-the-line publications as Time Out, the Sunday London Times, The Observer, and Punch. A "quickie" book about rock music group Duran Duran followed, as did a collection of amusing hyperbolic excerpts from science fiction novels and movies, Ghastly beyond Belief (1985), which Gaiman co-edited with novelist Kim Newman.

His name becoming known, and his interests settling into their distinctive groove, Gaiman made contacts with influential people in the comic book industry, and began producing original scripts. Early works in this form included Violent Cases (1987), Outrageous: Tales of the Old Testament (1987), Black Orchid (1988-89), Signal to Noise (1989-90), Miracleman: The Golden Age (1992), Death: The High Cost of Living (1993), and The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch (1994).

Meanwhile, Gaiman had married (in 1985), edited a decidedly unconventional poetry anthology (pace Wordsworth) Now We Are Sick (1987), authored the informal critical study The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion (1988), and—in 1992—moved with his wife and two young children to the U.S., settling in Minnesota (a third child, his daughter Maddy, has since been born, in America).

During the 1990s, Gaiman spearheaded Comic Relief, a movement that developed into the Comic Legal Defense Fund, offering support to comics artists and writers who have been victims of censorship. He has remained an active participant in its activities, despite a workload that has increased exponentially as Gaiman has kept branching out into new venues and forms of expression.

In 1990 he collaborated with the wildly popular British fantasist Terry Pratchett (author of the megabestselling Discworld Novels) on Good Omens, a comic novel about the end of the world as observed and experienced by miscellaneous divinities, demons, and humans, replete with satanic nuns, fallen angels, a deity who has gotten really tired of humanity, and a riptide of millennial gags undoubtedly inspired by the aforementioned Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams's 1979 cult favorite.

Good Omens is a very funny (if more than slightly overstuffed, and minimally self-indulgent) romp, whose quality may best be suggested by this tribute from Gaiman's peer (and fellow American emigrant), horror novelist Clive Barker: "The apocalypse has never been funnier."

In 1996, Gaiman wrote an original script for BBC Television: a tale of fantastic adventure set in a mythical "London Below" the real city, which story would soon be reshaped into his first adult novel written alone. A year later, he conquered yet another field with his first fiction for young adults, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. This agreeably whimsical story became a bestseller, and was chosen one of the Best Children's Books of 1997 and cited as Recommended Reading by Scholastic Magazine.

But by this time, Gaiman's name had already become widely known via the medium that was his first love and to which he would continue to return.

The first installment of The Sandman, a comic book that appropriated and altered a character from a 1970s comic (created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby) appeared in 1988. Its eponymous protagonist, formerly an avenging superhero who used "sleeping gas" to subdue criminals, was reimagined by Gaiman into a reclusive nonhuman reminiscent of the legendary figures of the Wandering Jew and Flying Dutchman.

Sandman, also known as Dream (and Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, among other cognomens and titles), is one of seven immortal siblings, all personifications of elemental entities that inhabit and shape human consciousness. His counterparts-and a strangely dysfunctional, perpetually conflicted "family" they are indeed—are Destiny, Desire, Delirium, Despair, Destruction, and Death.

The Sandman, who presides over a realm known as The Dreaming and who in effect orchestrates the dreams—and hence the imaginations—of all living beings, is, as envisioned by graphic artist Dave McKean (who drew all the individual issues' cover images), a brooding Byronic presence whose dark good looks and preference for black clothing have struck multiple responsive chords in readers. For one thing, this "Dream" rather resembles the striking-looking Neil Gaiman himself. For another, his likeness is credited with being one of the major inspirations for the Goth Movement of the 1990s.

Dream is a somewhat morose character, detached from any real communion or empathy with his peers or with humans (no matter how much he interacts with others). And the thrust of the entire Sandman series is the arduous process through which he comes to terms with his mission, his fallibility, and his future.

The original Sandman (for there have been successors) consists of seventy-five monthly issues (plus a 1991 "extra" installment, The Sandman Special ), which ran from 1988 to 1996 and are collected in ten more-or-less sequential paperback anthologies. Gaiman had been granted considerable freedom to develop the concept of The Sandman in whatever way struck his imagination. The hugely exfoliating storyline he created immediately attracted some of the fantasy genre's most renowned graphic artists, and soon drew critical praise (expressed in "Introductions" written for the paperback volumes) from such genre luminaries as Stephen King, Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, and Samuel R. Delany.

Sandman was likewise a huge commercial success, and still sells more than a million copies annually. It won multiple Eisner Awards for both text and artwork, and has since been optioned by Warner Brothers for a major motion picture (because, as Gaiman has slyly commented, "nothing is ever soon to be a minor motion picture").

Each of the ten paperback Sandman volumes groups individual issues thematically rather than in consistent chronological order. In Preludes and Nocturnes (issues #1-8), a moribund British antiquarian, Roderick Burgess, while attempting to capture Death (and thus live forever), instead seizes Death's brother Dream, who is imprisoned for seventy-two years and stripped of his otherworldly powers by the theft of his magical "tools": a pouch, helmet, and ruby. Dream's absence from his usual duties produces a worldwide epidemic of sleeping sickness (rendered in stunning visual images). When Dream finally escapes, the quest to recover his tools takes him to Hell itself, thence the home of John Dee, the son of Burgess's mistress Ethel Cripps, and a fugitive from the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane (in a grimly humorous nod to the creator of fictional Arkham, Massachusetts: H. P. Lovecraft).

These lively melodramatics are followed by Dream's encounter (in "The Sound of Her Wings" ) with his sister Death, a forthright street punk who basically tells her sibling to stop feeling sorry for himself and tend to his business as lord of The Dreaming.

Subsequent issues alternate between concentrating on Dream's progress (or lack of it) in shouldering his burdens and separate stories both intimately and only tangentially related to it. In The Doll's House (issues #9-16), for example, the escape of several rebellious Dreams from the Sandman's realm lead him to fear that his world is falling apart—and introduces the characters of self-sacrificing Rose Walker; British author G. K. Chesterton; 14th-century commoner Hob Gadling, who bargains successfully with Dream and is rewarded with immortality; and the sinister Corinthian, who appears to be Dream's murderous alter ego.

This volume's stories include a faux African folktale ("Tales in the Sand" ) that describes Dream's love affair with black queen Nada, and a mordantly amusing account of a serial killers' convention.

Dream Country (issues #17-20), which incidentally reveals the gradual erosion of Dream's abstracted indifference to the world around him, ranges farther afield, to depict the Muse Calliope captured and sexually exploited by a blocked writer, a gorgeously detailed alternate reality in which felines hold dominion over humans ("A Dream of a Thousand Cats" ), and—in one of the series's most gratifying high points—a marvelous fantastical retelling of Shakespeare's matchless comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In Gaiman's inspired version, a summary of the play's action is surrounded and enriched by the story of its first production (and the involvement therein of its author's twin children Hamnet and Judith) and an explanation of how it came to be written: out of a Faustian pact with Dream, whereby the struggling playwright came into his full artistic maturity.

It was "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (issue #19) that received the World Fantasy Award as its year's Best Short Story—the only comic book issue ever to be so honored. Season of Mists (issues #21-28) depicts the consequences of Lucifer's decision to abandon Hell (which perhaps echoes God's annoyance with His creation in Good Omens ) and give the key to its gates to Dream, who is thereupon importuned by numerous beings eager to seize control of the infernal regions. Deities from various theologies and mythologies keep popping up (thus prefiguring Gaiman's later novel American Gods ), as do the trouble-making demon Azazel and the Norse god of mischief Loki (who is in many ways Dream's exact temperamental opposite).

This entertaining volume, whose resonant title is derived from Keats's great "Ode to Autumn," is notable also for its very interesting characterization of a sensitive and ethically complex Lucifer, and as a further development of growing rifts among the increasingly distracted Dream and his squabbling Endless siblings.

In A Game of You (issues #32-37), a previously encountered character named Barbie (and obviously inspired by the popular doll of the 1950s) becomes a princess reigning over a "dreamworld" imperiled by The Cuckoo, a destroyer bent on holding sway over a world purged of living beings. Dream is essentially an offstage presence in this somewhat surprising sequence, which contains teasing echoes of The Wizard of Oz (with Barbie as Dorothy, and her valiant dog Martin Tenbones as Toto), and strongly suggests the dangers of living within one's imagination—perhaps another warning signal to the Sandman.

Fables and Reflections, a ragbag volume that contains issues #29-31, 38-40, 50, the aforementioned Sandman Special, and a new story entitled "Fear of Falling," offers several crucial stories. These include Emperor Augustus Caesar's disclosure of the real reasons why Rome fell; the adventures of the (historical) self-proclaimed "Emperor of America," late 19th-century San Francisco eccentric Joshua Norton (who was befriended by a much amused Mark Twain); and envisionings of Baghdad then and now, ranging from the fabulous caliphate of Haroun AlRaschid (immortalized in The Arabian Nights) to its contemporary wartime state.

And, in a return to Dream's own preoccupations, "The Song of Orpheus" retells the familiar myth, adding the complication that Dream—who is revealed to be Orpheus's father—declines to restore the latter's beloved Eurydice to life.

Brief Lives (issues #41-49), whose title denotes its emphases, involves Dream—at his sister Delirium's request—in a search for his missing brother Destruction, who has grown weary of humanity's misappropriation of his gift, and become estranged from The Endless. This almost unrelentingly grim sequence (relieved intermittently by such charming spectacles as that of Babylonian goddess Ishtar moonlighting as an exotic dancer) focuses further on Dream's em-battled condition, when he is obliged—like the biblical patriarch Abraham—to take the life of his own son. Fewer specifics should be revealed about the succeeding volumes. World's End (issues #51-56) indeed anticipates the promise of its title, as travelers stranded during a "reality storm" exchange stories, in the manner made famous by Boccaccio and Chaucer. The choicest tales are a flavorful sea story ("Hob's Leviathan" ) reminiscent of Stevenson and Melville, and an ingenious Horatio Alger-like story of a teenager ("The Golden Boy" ) who miraculously becomes President of the United States.

The Kindly Ones (issues #57-69) brings The Dreaming under siege, by the classical Furies to whom its title alludes, and by the malicious mischief-making of Loki and Puck. The Sandman's "sin" is a careless remark, made much earlier in the series, that initiated a chain of devastating consequences, taking the form of wrongs that can only be righted—as gathering events make clear—by a purifying sacrificial act.

Volume ten The Wake (issues #70-75) is very much a tying up of loose ends, in which a haunting Chinese tale memorably dramatizes the complex relationships of fathers to sons, Dream converses once more with the undying Hob Gadling, and the full truth of Will Shakespeare's bargain is revealed, with the second and last of his plays devoted to dreams and their consequences: The Tempest. Suffice it to say that The Wake literally is a wake, that celebrates as it mourns the nature of Dream (and dreaming), his gift to the world over which he broods with such sorrowful contemplation, and his destiny.

More than two thousand pages long, crammed with arresting and strangely beautiful images, featuring both an absorbing central narrative and a bountiful array of old and new stories, The Sandman revolutionized the graphic novel form, in effect creating an entirely new readership for comic books, and spreading Neil Gaiman's name throughout the land. And it was only the beginning.

Gaiman returned to the Sandman conception in 1999 with The Dream Hunters, a gorgeously illustrated short novel about a fox who befriends, then comes to love a gentle monk—and travels to the land of dreams in order to save her beloved from a malevolent landowner. Like the earlier Sandman episode "A Dream of a Thousand Cats," it's a wonderful modern version of the traditional beast fable: "an old Japanese fable," Gaiman has since said of this limpid work, "[that] I completely made up."

A new Sandman collection, Endless Nights, appeared in 2003. It contains seven stories, each related to or featuring one of The Endless. One of its best is "Death and Venice," in which a pleasure-loving nobleman's plot to cheat time (and thus death as well) is juxtaposed with an introverted soldier's life-long emotional momentum toward the nameless woman he met in his youth: Death herself. Another is a dark and intriguing miscellany entitled "Fifteen Portraits of Despair" (which includes two ironically apposite observations: "It is a writer, with nothing left that he knows how to say" and "It is an artist, and fingers that will never catch the vision"). Even better is "On the Peninsula," an ingeniously unsettling tale of archaeologists who explore a presumably post-nuclear future.

Gaiman's expertly "caught" vision has extended itself still further, in The Sandman: Book of Dreams (1996), a collection of stories written and illustrated by admirers of the original series; and in The Sandman Presents: The Furies (2003), written by Mike Carey and illustrated by John Bolton, which is a sequel to the series' penultimate volume, The Kindly Ones.

Additional to this evidence that Dream will not really die are Gaiman's several affirmative responses whenever he's asked by interviewers whether he will return again to this material. Endless Nights is, in all likelihood, not the end of this story.

Meanwhile, this protean author's mastery of adult fiction was evidenced by Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions (1998), an expanded version of Gaiman's 1993 gathering of shorter work, Angels and Visitations.

This is a richly varied collection of thirty short stories and narrative poems, many of which transform classic figures from well-known myths, legends, and folktales into their darker (and, in some cases, funnier equivalents). "Nicholas Was," for example, introduces a disturbingly unconventional Santa Claus. "Don't Ask Jack" (which may have been inspired by Walter de la Mare's great story "The Riddle") features an evil Jack-in-the-box. And the poem "Bay Wolf" updates the grim Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf by shifting it into the giggly suntanned world of television's cluelessly inane Baywatch.

Gaiman rewrites the story of Snow White from the viewpoint of the jealous Queen ("Snow, Glass, Apples" ), retells a folktale of magical revenge ("The Daughter of Owls" ) in the style of seventeenth-century British antiquarian John Aubrey, and appropriates H. P. Lovecraft's dank haunted New England landscape of Innsmouth in "Only the End of the World Again" and "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" (in the latter story, an American student traveling through England learns through unfortunate chance meetings that "there were things that lurked beneath gray raincoats that man was not meant to know").

These "messages from Looking-Glass Land and pictures in shifting clouds" (so identified in Gaiman's "Introduction" to them) pay other homages—to fantasy writer Michael Moorcock and his contemporaries in a ruminative memoir of Gaiman's early reading ("One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock" ) and to those masters of narrative concision John Collier and Ray Bradbury in "We Can Get Them for You Wholesale," the story of a jealous lover who patronizes an assassination service and discovers the pleasures of megalomania and mass murder. There are also more strictly contemporary stories, including "Looking for the Girl," set in "the London club scene in the early seventies," and "Tastings," which portrays a female succubus, or lamia, in a hair-raisingly graphic manner.

But these pale in comparison with the collection's finest story "Chivalry" (which Gaiman has singled out as a favorite piece for public readings). Told in the most restrained plain style imaginable, this is a perfect little fantasy, whose widowed protagonist Mrs. Whitaker happens one day to purchase the Holy Grail in a second-hand shop. Having brought it home, she is visited by the Arthurian knight Galahad, who has long sought it. Mrs. Whitaker's "temptation" by the handsome adventurer, and the sensible decision she makes, are quite movingly conveyed, in a tale that effortlessly blends the world of her own dowdy routine with the realm of chivalric romance. It's a great story, not nearly well enough known: the centerpiece of a remarkable collection that proved Neil Gaiman's continuing success with every task and challenge he had set himself.

In 1998 Gaiman published the novel Neverwhere, an expansion of the script written earlier for television performance. It's the story of Richard Mayhew, a young man from a provincial town who moves to London, makes his fortune (in a manner of speaking), and acquires a beauteous fiancée named Jessica.

Richard's life changes abruptly when he encounters a witch-like old woman who solemnly announces that he will soon undergo a remarkable experience that "starts with doors." Sure enough, Richard meets a frail, comely girl who calls herself Door, and aids her in her flight from a pair of grotesque assassins for hire, Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar (whose communal demeanor may be indicated by the way they answer their telephone, thus: "Croup and Vandemar,… Eyes gouged, noses twisted, tongues pierced, chins cleft, throats slit"). These distinctly uncharming partners were, Door surmises, undoubtedly implicated in the murder of her family, which she and Richard thereupon set out to solve.

Richard follows Door to "London Below," a city beneath the "real" London ("where the people who fall through the cracks go"). Here he wanders through a tumultuous Floating Market, meeting various angelic and demonic persons and personifications, and proving his mettle by doing battle with the fearsome Great Beast of London. The novel ends with Richard restored to the life for which he is best suited, and the two Londons continue to exist in a richly suggestively symbolic mutual relationship.

Neverwhere is Gaiman's best novel so far. Its likable hero (whose surname evokes the historical Henry Mayhew, author of the classic nineteenth-century sociological study London Labour and the London Poor) is a vivid contemporary equivalent of the archetypal innocent youth who grows by fits and starts into his hero-hood; Croup and Vandemar make a splendid psychopathic vaudeville time (they resemble nothing so much as a bloodthirsty Laurel and Hardy); and the eerily detailed landscape of London below is etched with bravura nightmarish precision: it's a setting that might have been invented by a Kafka-influenced Dickens.

Its successor Stardust (1999) is made of somewhat gentler stuff, though the spell it casts is scarcely less seductive. This beguiling adult fairy tale begins in rural England in the 1830s, in the town of Wall, named thus for the "high grey rock wall" between it and an otherworldly "meadow" in which not-quite-human figures are frequently glimpsed. The inhabitants of this meadow ("Faerie") are quite willing to mingle occasionally with mortals. And, on one such occasion, during Wall's annual April fair, young Dunstan Thorn falls in love with a maiden from the meadow and conceives a child with her.

The latter, who grows up in Wall, becomes Tristran Thorn. And, like his father Dunstan before him, young Tristran becomes enamored of a bewitching girl, Victoria Forester—who, in a playful moment, agrees to accept Tristran's love if he retrieves for her the streaking star they had together observed falling to earth; or, more precisely, beyond the rock wall, within the boundaries of Faerie.

The bulk of the novel recounts Tristran's amazing adventures, as he learns he is not the star's only pursuer. The murderous sons of the villainous Lord of Stormhold (accompanied by the dead brothers whom they the living have murdered) are his chief rivals, but they're only part of a phantasmagoric parade that includes assorted trolls and spell-mumbling hags, a farm boy transformed into a goat, and a wood nymph turned into a tree, among others. Tristran finds the star (which turns out to be, rather than an astral body, a person—and not a particularly agreeable one), but not before exploits aboard a passing "sky ship," his own metamorphosis (into a dormouse), and a bittersweet return to Wall, upon which he learns—as did Richard Mayhew in Neverwhere —that his destiny is neither as commonplace nor as earthbound as he had been brought up to believe.

The protagonists of Neverwhere and Stardust, heroes though they may be, are fairly simply drawn characters compared with "Shadow" Moon, the central figure of Gaiman's multiple-prizewinning next novel American Gods (2001).

A bit of hint as to who Shadow really is is dropped when we learn that he is thirty-two, has served three years of a prison term for "aggravated assault and battery," and has just been freed, after learning that his wife Laura has died in an automobile accident. Shadow travels by plane to Indiana for Laura's funeral, and the story's real complications begin.

En route, Shadow meets a loquacious "businessman" of uncertain identity ("Call me Wednesday," he affably declares), and impulsively accepts an equally undefined job as the latter's chauffeur and "handyman."

Shadow's subsequent waking and dreaming moments are populated by bizarre otherworldly figures. A human with the head of a buffalo offers him sonorous cryptic advice. Laura's ghost visits him, taking unusual corporeal form.

At this point the narrative begins expanding to include several interpolated stories. An 18th-century Irish girl, Essie Tregowan, is "transported" to America. Salim, a Middle Eastern immigrant, becomes the lover of a mischievous spirit (an ifrit) working as a Manhattan cabdriver. Boy and girl twins sold by their wicked uncle are brought to America on a slave ship: the boy grows up to participate in a bloody slave rebellion; the girl becomes a healer, and the forerunner of "voudon" queen Marie Laveau.

Meanwhile, Shadow and Wednesday travel throughout middle America, establishing a kind of base in Lakeside, Wisconsin, making preparations for a "meeting" Wednesday is arranging. The schemes related to it are described by one suspicious colleague as follows: "he wants a last stand. He wants to go out in a blaze of glory."

Shadow is repeatedly warned that a storm is approaching. Reality seems to be losing its bearings: as Shadow watches television in a motel room, Rob Petrie physically abuses his Laura; and Lucy Ricardo speaks from the screen directly to Shadow.

Even more sinister omens pile onto one another. In Chicago, a ruffian named Czernobog wins a game of checkers, and reserves the right to beat Shadow's brains out on an unspecified later occasion. Wednesday has some strange business with mortician Mr. Ibis and his associate Mr. Jacquel. A murderous old man named Hinzelmann poses yet another threat to the increasingly bewildered Shadow.

The reader gradually understands that the "old gods" worshipped around the world have followed the emigrants who believe in them to America—where they are confronted by the "new gods" of consumerism and mass communication (Media, for example—who is at one point mistaken for the classical antiheroine "who killed her children")—and that Wednesday (who is the Norse god Wotan, not all that carefully disguised) has, with Shadow's aid, summoned them to a climactic, perhaps apocalyptic gathering.

Shadow's function in this götterdämmerung is made clear by the novel's climactic events. When the slain Wednesday is buried (beneath an ancient "world tree"), Shadow keeps the required vigil over his grave, tied to the tree, denied food and water, until Mr. Ibis conducts him on a subsequent journey that involves a flight by "thunderbird" (and no, Virginia, it's not an automobile), the payment of what he owes to the patient Czernobog, a Dantean task accomplished on a "frozen lake," and a terrific surprise contained in an ironic concluding "Postscript."

American Gods is, arguably, a bit too playful and hectic for its own good. But much of the very considerable pleasure this rich novel offers consists in recognizing the theological and mythological sources of its boldly drawn characters. Most readers who are attuned to Gaiman's encyclopedic imagination will note that the ibis and the jackal are key figures in Egyptian myth, that Shadow's light-fingered former cellmate "Low Key" Lyesmith has his own divine counterpart—perhaps even that the blowsy good-time gal "Easter" somewhat resembles pagan goddess of spring Eostre, the spry little black man Mr. Nancy has many of the qualities of the West African trickster-creator Anansi, and that the buffalo-headed sage of Shadow's dreams has many antecedents in Native American folklore.

The novel's key incidents and incidental details are similarly freighted with symbolic suggestiveness. Shadow's hobby of "coin manipulation," at which he's particularly adept, marks him as one potentially capable of magic. His "combat" with Czernobog closely echoes the medieval tale of Arthurian knight Sir Gawain's fateful encounter with the mysteriously powerful Green Knight. His ordeal on that frozen lake emphatically implies a journey to the infernal regions and back. And when Wednesday rises from the dead to inform Shadow that "there's power in the sacrifice of a son," we understand that America's gods, native and newly arrived, are not the only ones involved in the drama of Shadow's passage from sin and error to purification through suffering.

This big novel received numerous mainstream reviews (unusual for a book by an author associated with the fantasy genre) and effectively confirmed Gaiman's reputation as a "serious" writer. When he followed it with Coraline (2002), a scary young adult novel about a preadolescent girl who discovers an alternate reality within her family's house, even more rapturous reviews greeted the book. Coraline (a story that adult readers should not overlook) won the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and British Science Fiction Association Awards, and is already spoken of as a contemporary classic.

Gaiman's seemingly indefatigable energies have produced, within the last four years, several more graphic novels: a shivery tale of lycanthropy (Only the End of the World Again [an illustrated version of Gaiman's short story] 2000); a chilling love story based on commedia dell' arte characters and motifs (Harlequin Valentine, 2001); a weird tale of a sinister "rock legend" (The Last Temptation, 2001); and the story behind the story of the angel Lucifer's fall from heaven (Murder Mysteries, 2003), expanded from a story that had appeared in Smoke and Mirrors.

The aforementioned feature film Mirror Mask will be along later this year. Other Gaiman works optioned for film include Death: The High Cost of Living, Neverwhere, and Stardust. Gaiman websites advise that a sequel to American Gods is in the works.

In a 1999 interview with the internet journal Writers Write, Gaiman said "As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning." Perhaps. But when a storyteller so generous and gifted dreams to such stunning effect, one wants only to say: Sleep well. Dream well. Then get up, as late as you please, and write down for us all that you have dreamed.

TITLE COMMENTARY

THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH (1997)

Margo MacDonald (review date 1997)

SOURCE: MacDonald, Margo. Review of The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. SF Site (online magazine) (1997).

"A children's book by Neil Gaiman?" you may be asking yourself skeptically. But yes, it's true, [The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish ] is actually a book meant to be enjoyed by children. And I think they will enjoy it, even though at heart the story is simply another retelling of the old tale of an object that gets swapped from person to person, until the original owner needs it back—and then has to swap possessions back again, step by step, to retrieve it. Gaiman's knack for storytelling wins you over right away and leaves you smiling at the end.

But what makes this book truly charming is the combination of Gaiman's wit and the remarkable artwork by McKean. Each page is lavishly illustrated with simple ink drawings washed over and filled in with vibrant colours (except for the goldfish, of course, which are real—well okay, photographs of real fish incorporated into the illustrated world). McKean manages to convey character and mood very simply, though the overall effect feels very detailed. For me, the whole thing was worth it just for the drawing of Galveston, the rabbit—but you'd really have to see it to understand. I think some little ones might be overwhelmed at first by the style of illustration, but they certainly won't get bored quickly and neither would any adults who happened to be reading it, you know, just to see if their niece/nephew might like it.

Robert Wiersema (review date 1997)

SOURCE: Wiersema, Robert. Review of The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. Green Man Review (online magazine) (1997).

[In the following review, Wiersema lauds Gaiman for embracing "his inner juvenile surrealist" in The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish.]

Anyone who has spent any time with a child, or with a children's book, will realize that a child's sense of humour, and of reality, tends toward the gloriously demented. In the open, amorphous, formative state of the early years, when language and meaning are fluid, the artificial boundaries which we as adults find ourselves so hemmed in by are utterly absent. How else to explain a child's love for the works of Dr. Seuss, or for Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth? Every child is a gleeful surrealist, at least until the world beats it out of them, through the process commonly (and with a dangerous banality) referred to as "growing up."

Some adults, however, don't seem to have taken the bruising quite as badly as most. The lessons don't seem to have quite stuck. Their imaginations skip freely from point to point, deftly defying arbitrary restrictions and boundaries, keeping their vision of their art foremost in their mind, and paying little heed to those who would try to rein them in. Think of Klimt, or Picasso. Miles Davis, or John Coltrane.

Think of Neil Gaiman.

The transplanted English fantasy writer (see how reflexive it is to categorize, without even considering it), based in the United States for over a decade, has made a career of leaping through the imagination and across genres and forms as varied as straightforward novels and short stories, radio plays, screenplays and graphic novels. No matter the genre, what always comes to the fore is Gaiman's sweeping vision, and his great sense of, and love for, story in its purest, least adulterated form. While most of his adult writing folds in on itself to both reference and include varying mythologies, religions, folk tales and motifs, and figures that could only be drawn from dreams, his first foray into writing for children is more down to earth: a sunny afternoon, playing in the yard. A boy and his sister. A friend and his goldfish. A father who "doesn't pay much attention to anything, when he's reading his newspaper."

Of course, as any child will tell you, from these such innocent things do great adventures come.

With The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, Gaiman fully embraces his inner juvenile surrealist. While the cover promises the books "will delight anyone who is—or has ever been—a kid," Gaiman goes further than delight. Reading this book, an adult will be plunged back into a child-like frame of mind, a reality, once coloured in Seuss-ian bolds, now vivid and starkly rendered by Gaiman's long-time friend and frequent illustrator Dave McKean in line drawings, collages and bold washes.

When his friend Nathan brings two goldfish to our narrator's house, he MUST have them. He tries to trade away baseball cards, an old robot, a punching bag and a penny-whistle, but to his horror, "Every time I showed him something, Nathan said 'No.'" Every time, that is, until he offers Nathan his father in exchange. "He's bigger than your goldfish," he argues, adding that he can swim "better than a goldfish." His sister refutes this claim with a terse "Liar," but it's too late. The deal made, Nathan takes home the narrator's father, and all seems fine until his mother comes home, and, after ungagging the sister and finding out the truth, demands the trade be undone. Unfortunately, Nathan has already traded away the father for an electric guitar, and our narrator, accompanied by his little sister, undertakes an epic voyage of wheeling and dealing to return his father safely home.

While McKean's visuals are tremendous (the vision of the father in a rabbit hutch is unforgettable, and the textured collages which form the backgrounds to many of the illustrations are key narrative and thematic elements themselves), the story belongs to Gaiman. With the wry worldliness of Tom Sawyer, the sly surrealism of Dr. Seuss and the rhythmic narrative quality and matter-of-factness of P. D. Eastman's Are You My Mother?, Neil Gaiman's The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish is simply a treat, a journey back to a simpler time in the hands of one of our most creative voices.

CORALINE (2002)

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Tim Pratt (review date 1 July 2002)

SOURCE: Pratt, Tim. "Of Explorers and Button Eyes: Neil Gaiman's Coraline." Strange Horizons (online magazine) (1 July 2002).

[In the following review, Pratt discusses Gaiman's multifaceted career and declares Coraline to be Gaiman's "crowning accomplishment."]

The canon of my childhood favorites was set, not surprisingly, in my childhood, and includes Lewis Carroll's Alice books, Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, and too many others to list. And yet, recently, a new book made its way onto that list, and managed to inspire the same sense of adventure and wonder; to transport me, in all the good ways, back to childhood. That book is Coraline (which rhymes with "horrorwine," if you have Gaiman's British accent), the new YA by that increasingly impressive author-of-all-trades, Neil Gaiman. The phrase "instant classic" is an annoying oxymoron, but I'm tempted to use it for Gaiman's book anyway—I think it's one that children and grown-ups will be reading for a long time. The US edition features fabulous illustrations by Dave McKean; I had no idea the master of photo-collage could draw so well. When I have children of my own, I'll be waiting impatiently for them to be old enough to enjoy hearing me read Coraline to them aloud.

But before I get to the book in more detail, I'd like to say something about the author, and why Coraline is his crowning accomplishment. Neil Gaiman is the consummate storyteller currently working in the various fields of speculative fiction. In a world where niche marketing is increasingly prevalent, where authors sometimes have to resort to pseudonyms in order to even publish work in a different sub-genre from the one their fans are accustomed to, Gaiman defies categorization, and uses whatever approach seems appropriate for the story he wants to tell. During the course of his career, he has tried his hand at a variety of storytelling media—the comics that started his career (most notably Sandman, but also The Books of Magic and Violent Cases ); illustrated narratives like Stardust and The Dream Hunters ; powerful short stories like "Chivalry," "Troll Bridge," "Harlequin Valentine," and "Keepsakes & Treasures: A Love Story" ; poetry like "The White Road," "Eaten: Scenes from a Moving Picture," and "Vampire Sestina" ; the BBC mini-series Neverwhere and the novelization of the same name; his first true novel, the Hugo-nominated American Gods (which won a Stoker award, beating out odds-on favorite Black House by Stephen King & Peter Straub); and now a children's book, Coraline. Opinions differ regarding the relative quality of these works, of course, but I find all of them worthy of attention. In the breadth of his efforts and the depth of his accomplishment, Gaiman is slowly proving himself to be the storytelling virtuoso of our age, and Coraline may be his single most successful work to date.

Coraline is immensely important to Neil Gaiman. In his online journal, Gaiman talks about how much Coraline means to him, making it clear that the work is very close to his heart.

It's not difficult to see why. Sandman is the work that cemented Gaiman's fame, but its effect is a cumulative one—over the course of several years, Gaiman created an intricate, vast story composed of smaller stories. Coraline 's effect is far more compressed—the book can easily be read from beginning to end in a sitting—and all the more powerful for that. It's being marketed as a children's book, yes, but it's full of pleasures for adults, too.

So what's it about? Like most great children's books, it's about a smart, perceptive, quirky child dealing with deeply serious problems. The child in question is Coraline, who as the story begins has just moved into a new apartment with her mother and father. It's obvious that her parents love her, but they're too busy to give her the attention she would like. Her mother does her best to keep Coraline busy by setting her small tasks—like counting all the blue things in the flat—but Coraline is happiest when exploring on her own. (If her character could be summed up in a single word, it would be "explorer"—in the brave-and-intrepid sense, not the eaten-by-cannibals imperialist one.) In the course of her explorations, she finds a mysterious locked door in the drawing room. Her mother has the key, and shows Coraline what's behind the door—nothing but bricks. The door is an artifact from when the apartment house was a single dwelling, before it was split into flats, and there's an uninhabited apartment beyond the bricks.

Coraline explores the grounds and meets the other tenants. There's a "crazy old man" upstairs who tells Coraline that he's training his circus mice to play music, and Coraline finds him vaguely alarming, if only because she can't tell whether he's serious or joking. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, two aging former actresses, live downstairs with a coterie of Scottie dogs. Coraline is the type to find the prospect of danger more interesting than alarming. They give her a stone with a hole in the middle for protection.

Inevitably, Coraline takes the key and returns to the door, and this time when she opens it, there are no bricks, just a dark corridor. Coraline takes this in stride (perhaps because she's recently watched a television program about protective coloration, and understands that things can pretend to be other things). She passes through the door—what explorer wouldn't?—and emerges in a flat that is the mirror image of her own.

There she meets one of the most disturbing creatures I've ever encountered in fiction, a thing that looks much like her mother, except for the too-white hands and the black buttons she has instead of eyes. She tells Coraline that she's her "other mother," and that Coraline may stay with her forever; the chief advantages of this arrangement seem to be delicious food (Coraline's own parents seldom cook anything to her liking) and a lack of disciplinary constraints. Coraline also meets her "other father," who has buttons for eyes as well. The other mother leads Coraline into the kitchen, telling her there's just one thing she has to do before they can be a family. She shows Coraline a needle and thread and two buttons, which she wants to sew over Coraline's eyes.

Coraline sensibly refuses this disturbingly surreal request and escapes out the front door, into a garden much like her own. There she meets a black cat, which can travel freely from the real world to this one—but here, in the other mother's world, it can talk. The cat is a marvelous character, as inscrutable and infuriating as Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, and even more arch. "We—we could be friends, you know," Coraline says to the cat, which replies, "We could be rare specimens of an exotic breed of African dancing elephants." Nevertheless, the cat stays with her, and even provides help, later on.

Coraline explores further, and finds strange analogues to her own world—a theater full of dogs downstairs, where younger versions of Miss Forcible and Miss Spinks perform an endless vaudeville-style variety show, and a distinctly lunatic old man upstairs, who has dozens of red-eyed rats living in his suit. This world doesn't extend much beyond the garden gates, however, and seems altogether an unfinished place.

Unnerved, Coraline returns through the corridor, home—and discovers that her parents are gone. She tries not to worry, making dinner for herself—Coraline is a whiz with the microwave—but her parents don't come back, and later, Coraline sees them trapped behind a mirror, obviously imprisoned by the other mother. Being a sensible child, Coraline calls the police, and explains the whole situation to them. They react as one would expect, suggesting that Coraline have some hot chocolate and get a hug.

At this point, the problem is clear; Coraline will have to go through the door and get her parents back, though the prospect of facing the other mother again terrifies her. (At this point, she tells the cat a story about something her father did once, and in so doing offers the most concise and moving explanation of what it means to be brave that I've ever read.)

Getting back her parents is not an easy task. The other mother proves ever more monstrous, from the visceral (eating black beetles) to the temperamental (she calls the cat "vermin") to the personal (she tells Coraline that her real parents don't love her anymore). Things take a turn for the even-worse when Coraline meets the ghosts of children the other mother has "loved" in the past, and realizes what her own fate will be if she doesn't defeat the creature.

Armed only with her own resourcefulness, the stone with a hole in the center, and the cat's unpredictable assistance, Coraline has to outwit and defeat the other mother, and in so doing rescue not only her parents and herself but the poor trapped ghosts—and protect herself and the rest of the world from the other mother's grasp forever after.

The story is full of twists and nightmare images, dark surprises and moments of stunning beauty, and through it all there is never a misstep, nor a moment when it seems that Gaiman is unsure of what he's doing or what happens next, despite the fact that it took him ten years to write the book, and that he did so piecemeal, averaging about 2,000 words a year. It is a masterly achievement, a delight for children and adults alike—and I strongly encourage reading it aloud to someone you love, young or old or in between. You'll both be the better for it.

(For fun beyond the text, the Coraline Web site [] is quite entertaining, though it's Flash-intensive, so patience may be required; once it gets started, it's a very rewarding pointing-and-clicking experience.)

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Yvonne Zipp (review date 31 October 2002)

SOURCE: Zipp, Yvonne. "Perfect Mom Is a Nightmare." Christian Science Monitor (31 October 2002): 20.

[In the following review, Zipp compliments Gaiman's "beautifully spooky" prose in Coraline.]

If you open a door that's normally bricked up and a mysterious passage appears, slam that sucker shut and run.

"Don't go in there!" has been standard advice for every fairy tale and horror character since Bluebeard first got married.

Happily for readers, no self-respecting heroine since Bluebeard's wife has been able to withstand the lure of a locked door. Coraline, the bored young girl at the center of Neil Gaiman's beautifully spooky tale [Coraline ], proves no exception.

She and her distracted parents have just moved into a big old house that's been converted into apartments. Left to entertain herself while they busy themselves, she meets the quirky neighbors, all of whom get her name wrong—"It's Coraline, not Caroline."

She explores the grounds to find the well she's been ordered to stay away from, and she counts everything blue. But then she runs out of things to do.

One afternoon, while her mother is out, Coraline opens the bricked-up door in the drawing room, finds a secret passage, and walks inside. On the other side is an apartment that looks almost exactly like hers, and a woman who looks almost exactly like her mother—"only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving, and her dark red fingernails were curved and sharp." And she has large black buttons for eyes.

The woman tells Coraline that she's her "other mother." In her "other" house, Coraline gets to eat her favorite foods, dress in the kinds of clothes she loves, and play with toys far more fantastic than any in her real house. But when she goes back home through the passage, she finds that her real parents are gone and that her "other mother" has no intention of letting her new daughter escape her loving embrace.

Unlike many of the other adult writers trying their hand at a children's tale, Gaiman (American Gods, Neverwhere ) actually seems to understand the way children think. And his writing has the pared-down elegance of the best fairy tales. He begins with a quote from G. K. Chesterton: "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."

While some reviewers have called Coraline a horror story, it falls squarely in the fairy-tale tradition. There are certainly scary moments here, but the energy is more ominous than terrifying, and the Brothers Grimm trafficked in more gore. The publisher claims it's for children 8 and up, but I'd feel uncomfortable buying it for anyone younger than 10 or 11.

Young adults will enjoy the book's creepy humor and its unsettling exploration of what we really want and need from the people who love us.

Kate McDowell (review date November 2002)

SOURCE: McDowell, Kate. Review of Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 56, no. 3 (November 2002): 106-07.

[In Coraline, ] Coraline and her parents have just moved into a big old house that has been divided into several apartments, and Coraline has been meeting a cast of oddball but friendly neighbors. One strange architectural feature of her new home is a door that opens only to reveal a brick wall. Coraline finds this door intriguing, especially the day she opens it and, instead of the wall, finds a passageway. On the other end she finds a home identical to her own, complete with two people who call themselves her "other parents"; the only physical difference between these people and her real parents is their eyes: "[Their] eyes were buttons, big and black and shiny." Thus begins a nightmare that doesn't stop until Coraline escapes and, in a gruesome conclusion, throws her "other mother's" evil disembodied hand into the pit of a dark well. The nearly candy-coated opening, in which Coraline blithely explores her new neighborhood, provides a perfect complement to the creepy, bug-and-rat infested world of Coraline's horrifying experience. Gaiman's pacing is superb, and he steers the tension of the tale with a deft and practiced narrative touch. McKean's black-and-white illustrations depict first sunny and then eerie scenes in an old-fashioned style with spidery and elongated lines. Although this is not for the faint of heart, readers who have long coveted a horror story that would play to their most vivid fears will find the unforgettable "other mother" to be the perfect terrifying villain.

Anita L. Burkam (review date November-December 2002)

SOURCE: Burkam, Anita L. Review of Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. Horn Book Magazine 78, no. 6 (November-December 2002): 755-56.

[In Coraline, o]ut of sorts in her new home, Coraline finds a bricked-up door in the drawing room and, when her mother is out for the afternoon, discovers the bricks have gone and she can pass through to a very similar house with an "other mother" and an "other father." These two creepy specimens (with paper-white skin and black button eyes) want her to stay and be their little girl. Back in her own home, Coraline waits in vain for her parents to return, until at last she catches sight of a mirror image of them and determines she must head back into the alternate house to try to rescue them. What started out as a world set slightly askew turns nightmarish as Coraline joins the other mother in a game of hide-and-seek for her parents—winner take all. Images (white grub-like creatures in cobwebs; a toy box full of wind-up angels and tiny chatter-mouthed dinosaur skulls; the ubiquitous shiny black button eyes pictured in McKean's occasional dark and unsettling sketches as actual buttons) fly at the reader thick and fast, fully evoking the irrational yet unperturbing world of dreams, creating an avant-garde cinematic sweep of charged and often horrific flotsam from the subconscious. One wishes for a little more backstory to add depth and unity to the disparate images and a little more structure around the identity of the other mother (it turns out she resembles a kind of trap-door spider for souls, although exactly what she is or why she set up shop in Coraline's drawing room is left unstated). Still, the danger is convincingly dangerous, the heroine is convincingly brave, and the whirlwind denouement (helped along by a friendly cat and a rather clever ploy on the part of Coraline) will leave readers bemused but elated and slightly breathless.

Lowell Putnam (review date 2002)

SOURCE: Putnam, Lowell. Review of Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. (online magazine) (2002).

This summer, Harry Potter has finally left the #1 spot on kids' reading lists, and new heroes are emerging to whom young readers can really relate. One such exciting character is Coraline, the adventurous heroine of Neil Gaiman's book of the same name. This beautifully written, dark fairy tale finally acknowledges the underestimated and forgotten maturity of most young people; Gaiman isn't afraid to write a scary fantasy for children looking for more than just Disney-esque dragons and grounds-keeping giants.

Coraline (NOT "Caroline," as she will tell you adamantly) has just moved into a flat in an old house. Her upstairs and downstairs neighbors are kind and eccentric older people who can't get her name right, but encourage her curiosity and explorer's instincts. One rainy afternoon, wandering around bored out of her mind (as young explorers are wont to do on rainy afternoons), Coraline opens a locked door in her living room and finds her way into the mysterious "vacant" fourth flat in the house. Surprisingly, the apartment is far from empty, and Coraline comes face to face with two creatures who claim to be her "other" parents. In fact, there appears to be an entire magical "other" world through the door; there are amazing toys to play with and neighbors who never mess up her name.

Soon, however, Coraline realizes that this world is as deadly as it is enchanting. The "other mother" wants to keep Coraline there forever, and her intentions are hardly loving or parental. Coraline meets the ghosts of several other children who had been kidnapped hundreds of years ago, and she realizes that both her body and spirit are in danger. She has to use all her intelligence and exploratory prowess in order to defeat the horrible "other mother."

Coraline's story is truly frightening, and Gaiman goes to great lengths to forge an "other" world where every aspect of our lives is perverted and twisted into the macabre. Originally a comic-book writer, he uses lyrical comparisons that challenge the simple images of traditional children's books. Kids will enjoy the chills that run down their spines as they read this story and will be grateful that there is finally an author that refuses to patronize a young audience hungry for an absorbing horror tale.

Charles de Lint (review date February 2003)

SOURCE: de Lint, Charles. Review of Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. Fantasy & Science Fiction 104, no. 2 (February 2003): 30-1.

[In the following review, de Lint offers a positive assessment of Coraline, calling the book Gaiman's "most successful" children's book to date.]

Is there anything Gaiman doesn't do well?

Coraline isn't his first foray into children's fiction, but it's certainly his most successful. In fact, it's astonishingly good—an instant classic, if you'll excuse the hyperbole—and one that I can imagine both children and adults reading a hundred years from now with the same enjoyment they do Lewis Carroll's Alice books.

Carroll is actually a good touchstone, since Coraline reminds me of nothing so much as a macabre Alice in Wonderland. The title character doesn't go through a mirror or fall down a rabbit hole, but she does go through a door that normally opens on a brick wall to find herself in a twisted version of her own world. There she meets her other parents, the ones with buttons for eyes who want only the very best for Caroline, which includes making her one of their own.

Our plucky heroine escapes, only to find that her real parents have now been kidnapped and taken into that other world. Calling the police doesn't help—they only suggest she's having a nightmare and that she should go wake her mother and have her make a cup of hot chocolate. So it's up to Coraline to rescue not only her real parents, but also the spirits of the dead children that were taken before the "other mother" set her sights on Coraline.

The book is illustrated throughout by Dave McKean's pen and ink drawings that are both charming and strange. The prose is simple and lovely, the subject matter both dark and whimsical (sometimes whimsically dark, other times darkly whimsical—you get the idea). In accompanying material Gaiman writes that it's a story "that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares," and while I didn't get nightmares (I'm too much of a child, I suppose) I can easily see how both hold true. I do know that images from the book pop into my head at surprising times with an accompanying little shiver and thrill, and that I plan to reread it very soon. Now that I know the story, I want to savor the wonderful prose.

Collectors might be interested in tracking down a signed (by the author) limited edition that Harper-Collins has also produced. It features a color frontispiece by the book's illustrator as well as almost twenty pages of extra material that includes some more black and white art as well as commentaries by Gaiman himself. At around twenty-five dollars, it's a good price for a collectible book.

Or you can buy the Peanut Press e-book version, which also includes the additional material, at around eleven dollars.

THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS (2003)

Publishers Weekly (review date 30 June 2003)

SOURCE: Review of The Wolves in the Walls, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 26 (30 June 2003): 77.

"If the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over," is the oft-repeated prediction in Gaiman's latest [The Wolves in the Walls ], a picture book that cleverly balances humor and spookiness in a slightly off-kilter setting. As he did in his novel Coraline, the author again introduces an inquisitive girl who lives in a creepy old house with her distracted family. When Lucy hears "squeaking, creeping, crumpling noises" from inside the house's walls, she's convinced it must be wolves. Lucy's parents and younger brother, who don't share Lucy's sharply attuned ear, but have heard bad things about wolves in people's walls, insist any noise must be emanating from something more logical, like rats or mice. But when Lucy's hunch comes true, the family flees—until brave, determined Lucy hatches a plan to turn the tables. Gaiman's text rings with energetic confidence and an inviting tone, even as he leads readers into a bizarre and potentially spine-tingling scenario. McKean (who previously collaborated with Gaiman on the Sandman comics and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish ) expertly matches the tale's funny-scary mood. Lucy shines as a heroine, standing tall among somewhat tuned-out supporting characters that are an inventive mixture of ordinary and odd. Against shadow-filled backdrops that blend paint, digital manipulation and photography, his stylized human figures look right at home. His pen-and-inks of the wolves, often with a judicious dash of color, suggest that they inhabit a world apart—or perhaps unreal? Author and artist credit their audience with the intelligence to puzzle out the question for themselves. All ages.

Janice M. Del Negro (review date September 2003)

SOURCE: Del Negro, Janice M. Review of The Wolves in the Walls, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 57, no. 1 (September 2003): 14.

[In The Wolves in the Walls, y]oung Lucy hears noises in the walls ("They were sneaking, creeping, crumpling noises"), and although her mother, father, and brother tell her the noises are caused by mice, rats, and bats respectively, Lucy knows what it really is: "There are wolves in the walls." Of course, they don't believe her, and, of course (this being Gaiman, author of the eminently creepy Coraline,BCCB 11/02), Lucy is right. When the wolves come out of the walls, "it's all over," and the family flees into the night. Inspired by her successful sneak inside to rescue her pink pig-puppet, she leads her family "up the back steps … Through the back door—into the back hall—and into the walls." Eventually the family gets tired of walls and wolves and comes out spoiling for a fight; the wolves flee to "somewhere where there would never be any people in the walls who would come out in the middle of the night whooping and singing people songs and brandishing chair legs." Though the story runs on too long, Gaiman has one creepy imagination, and his goosebump-inducing tale is given full visual throttle by McKean's mixed-media, graphic-novel-style illustrations. The fragmented images, combining photographic elements and elegant drafting, are more than slightly off-kilter, and the uneasiness supplied by the distorted perspectives and fluctuating proportions adds an arresting eeriness to Gaiman's fantasy (the slavering wolves are particularly unnerving). Hand this to a jaded third or fourth-grader and watch their eyes get big—the better to see you with, my dear.

Charles de Lint (review date December 2003)

SOURCE: de Lint, Charles. Review of The Wolves in the Walls, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. Fantasy & Science Fiction 105, no. 6 (December 2003): 26.

I'd been looking forward to this book [The Wolves in the Walls ] ever since I first heard Gaiman talk about it on a panel at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention. Gaiman, it turns out, is one of those rare writers who can make a work-in-progress sound really fascinating. Usually, listening to that sort of thing makes for more tedium than I care to experience (don't tell me about the book, write it and let me read it on my own!), but Gaiman's brief description of a plucky young girl who realizes that wolves live inside the walls of her parents' house, and who then goes on to drive the family out so that they have to live at the bottom of the garden, promised to deliver a welcome helping of dark whimsy.

I was disappointed, however, when a galley arrived in my P.O. Box and I realized that The Wolves in the Walls wasn't so much like Coraline (a short novel with illustrations) as The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (a children's picture book). But the disappointment only lasted as long as it took me to get to the third page where Lucy first hears noises in the walls.

What follows is another splendid foray into the dark and strange mind of Gaiman, who, if nothing else, never delivers a story that takes you where you think it will. The prose here is very simple. There's no age given—probably because the publisher knows that adults will pick up a Gaiman book for themselves as readily as they buy one for their children—but I'd guess it's in the neighborhood of five and up. You might want to vet the story and pictures for possible nightmare inducing, though kids are far more resilient than we adults think they are.

McKean's art won't necessarily be to everyone's taste—it's a bit confrontational, rather than typical picture book pretty—but I love the look of it, and I'm sure children will, too.

Carlie Kraft Webber (review date 2003)

SOURCE: Webber, Carlie Kraft. Review of The Wolves in the Walls, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. (online magazine) (2003).

Lucy knows that there are wolves living in the walls of her house. She can hear them hustling and bustling, creeping and crumpling. She tries to warn her family, but no one believes her. "You have an overactive imagination," says her father. "You must be hearing mice, I suppose," says her mother. "Bats," says her brother. Lucy however knows better, and everyone who's anyone knows that when the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over.

When the wolves do come out of the walls, as Lucy has told everyone they would, her family doesn't know what to do. They take up residency at the bottom of their garden, and while they're debating as to whether to live in a hot-air balloon or a tree house, Lucy decides to confront the wolves and reclaim the family's house.

Don't be fooled by the picture-book format [of The Wolves in the Walls ]; this is most definitely a book for older readers. The many different art techniques, from photo collages to paintings to pen-and-ink drawings, give a bizarre air to the book, yet it's one that is effective due to the quirky nature of Lucy's story.

Lucy is a character every reader will love: she is resilient, brave and thoughtful, and she does not tolerate anyone or anything terrorizing her family. Her attitude toward getting the wolves out of her house is inspiring and ingenious, because everyone who's anyone knows that when the people come out of the walls, it's all over.

Additional coverage of Gaiman's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 19, 42; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 133; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 81, 129; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 195; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 261; Literature Resource Center; Major 21st-Century Writers, Ed. 2005; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers; St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, Ed. 4; Something about the Author, Vols. 85, 146; and Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 2.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Bender, Hy. The Sandman Companion. New York, N.Y.: DC Comics, 1999, 273 p.

Provides an overview of Gaiman's work on the Sandman comic book series, including plot summaries and interviews with Gaiman.

Keating, Anji. Review of The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. Bloomsbury Review 17, no. 4 (July-August 1997): 21.

Compliments The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish for capturing "the fantastic feeling of being a kid."

McCarty, Michael, editor. "Good Omens: An Interview with Neil Gaiman." In Giants of the Genre, pp. 46-52. Holicong, Pa.: Wildside Press, 2003.

Brief interview with Gaiman focusing on his novel Good Omens, his children's work Coraline, his feelings about writer Douglas Adams, and an interview postscript describing a reading and book signing in 2001.

Zaleski, Jeff. "Comics! Books! Films!: The Arts and Ambitions of Neil Gaiman." Publishers Weekly 250, no. 30 (28 July 2003): 46-57.

Provides an overview of Gaiman's writing projects in the media of comics, books, and film, iincluding interview material with Gaiman, his agent, and his publishers.