The enchanter

With his comic book masterpiece "The Sandman" and his instant-classic children's horror tale, "Coraline," Neil Gaiman has established himself as today's master of fantasy.

By Laura Miller

Sep 25, 2003 | I stumbled into the strangely familiar and familiarly strange universe of Neil Gaiman's writing through a side entrance of sorts, the novel "Neverwhere," which is based on a miniseries Gaiman created for the BBC. "Neverwhere" is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young, mild-mannered financial analyst whose life is transformed when he helps out what appears to be a homeless girl on a London street. That encounter sucks Richard out of London Above, the relatively sane, safe world he previously inhabited, and into London Below, a very dangerous subterranean netherworld in which tube station names become literal (a monastery at the Blackfriars stop, etc.) and rats are distinguished personages. Like Gaiman's fiction, London Below is a realm of wonders and terrors with a taproot running deep into the underworld of the human psyche.

The high road to Gaimanland, however, is "The Sandman," a comic book series compiled into a 10-volume set of graphic novels (plus ancillary books). To people who care about comics, "The Sandman" needs no introduction; it is a beloved, seminal work that bridged the gap between the form's pop mainstream and its experimental fringe.

But, to be blunt, I'm not someone who cares much about comics. Despite having read and admired works by Art Spiegelman, Los Bros Hernandez, Alan Moore, Chester Brown, Chris Ware and others, I still belong to that tribe of readers who'll pick a thousand words over a picture any day. I never would have sought out "The Sandman" if I hadn't already been enchanted by "Neverwhere," "American Gods" (Gaiman's 2001 novel for adults) or the sublime "Coraline," the children's book he published last year.

Since those last two titles both hit the New York Times bestseller list, I'm surely not the only reader to first fall in love with Gaiman's imagination via the medium of plain prose. Somehow, though, he hasn't quite registered on the public's consciousness as decisively as he ought to. He is, as one journalist put it, the famous author you've never heard of, a baffling fact in the age that made J.K. Rowling its darling.

Perhaps it's Gaiman's comics background that puts some people off, a prejudice in danger of being cemented by the publication this month of "The Sandman: Endless Nights," a collection of graphic stories based in the Sandman universe. But Gaiman's ongoing fondness for the medium shouldn't discourage comics-wary readers from exploring his work; instead, the appearance of "Endless Nights" should be the occasion for confirmed prose junkies -- Gaiman aficionados and novices alike -- to make a foray, however brief, off the reservation. Trust me, it's well worth the trip.

To newcomers, "Endless Nights" on its own probably won't convey the allure of the Sandman epic. It's a lovely hardcover collection, illustrated by some major artists in the field, but it feels a bit like a commemorative souvenir program to the main event. DC Comics' arty imprint, Vertigo, makes the whole Sandman series available in 10 paperbacks, and that's the place for novices to dive in, with Volume 1, "Preludes and Nocturnes." Stick with it through Volume 2, "The Doll's House," and you'll be hooked.

Gaiman sees himself as part of the age-old profession of storytellers, but unlike a lot of the tiresome people who go around referring to themselves that way, he's right. His fiction, in its various media (he also writes screen- and radio plays), induces that blissful, semi-hypnotic state most of us first experienced as children, when the power of a book seemed to erase the world around us, and when reading felt almost like a drug. Gaiman is interested in all the traditional forms of storytelling -- legends, folk and fairy tales, myth -- and not just in the stories themselves, but the ways they get told. Not surprisingly, the hero of the Sandman epic is Morpheus, the King of Dreams, who also presides over stories.

Gaiman certainly wasn't the first comics writer to draw on ancient myths, but he could be the first to really understand how myths work, not just as motifs but as nodes of meaning that gain new layers as we attach new experiences to old stories. For example, the Egyptian god Osiris, the Norse god Balder, Jesus and John F. Kennedy are all very different figures and yet -- in some fundamental way having to do with how we understand them -- also the same. As the British writer C.S. Lewis (a major influence on Gaiman) pointed out, a myth is a story that can be told and retold in very different ways and yet remain essentially intact. There is no original or correct version of the Orpheus myth, just countless ways of revealing it, and even people who haven't heard the traditional Greek version recognize it as something powerful when they meet it in another form.

Gaiman's fiction is teeming with gods -- most memorably the has-been deities eking out a meager living in the contemporary United States of "American Gods" -- but Dream isn't one of them. He's more of an embodied principle of existence, one of seven siblings, the Endless, who also include Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Destruction and Delirium. There's a real danger of ludicrous grandiosity in this premise, but Gaiman counterbalances all the metaphysics with a quotidian funkiness. On one page the Sandman may be facing off against Lucifer in Hell, but soon enough he'll be sulking at a family gathering or bickering with Desire, who thinks he's a humorless stuffed shirt.

Perhaps Gaiman's most popular creation is Dream's older sister, Death, an adorable, ankh-wearing punkette who kindly leads the newly deceased to their fate. Death is the sensible, peace-making, considerate sibling among the Endless, and when she first appeared in the comic's eighth issue, she became an instant hit. As Dream sits glumly in lower Manhattan's Washington Square Park (he's in the doldrums after completing a major quest), she shows up to give him a good talking-to, accusing him of being "the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane."

Next Page: Unlike C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Gaiman never seeks to retreat from the real world

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