For the Reading the Author Challenge, I decided to catch up with one of my favourite authors: Neil Gaiman. I reread American Gods, Neverwhere, Anansi Boys (I listened to it), and Stardust and read Coraline and Preludes and Nocturnes (the first Sandman volume) for the first time. While I would have liked to also revisit Good Omens and Smoke and Mirrors, time got away from me! (I did read Gaiman’s latest short story collection, Fragile Things, earlier this year, if you want to see what I thought about it)

While I’ve been reading Gaiman for a couple months, I decided that I wanted to do one big post so that I could look at the big picture, instead of just talking about the individual books. Most of you have at least a passing acquaintance with Gaiman, since many book bloggers are big fans, but just in case, I’ll mention that Gaiman is a contemporary fantasy writer who is strongly influenced by mythology and folklore. He doesn’t tend to create big new worlds, a la epic fantasy, instead he focuses on the meeting between the ‘normal world’ and either faeries, gods, or other folklore figures.

Anyone who’s read even a little bit about mythology has heard about the Hero’s Journey. Developed by scholar Joseph Campbell, it’s essentially a blueprint common to many myths and legends around the world. In it, an ordinary man or woman becomes a hero through a series of five steps: first she’s somehow called from ordinary life into a grand adventure, perhaps in search of treasure or love or something else, then he must endure trials and tribulations in an attempt to achieve his end. When she does get her goal, she must somehow return to her ordinary life (rather like reverse culture shock!) and, finally, he may use whatever he learned along his journey to help the world. Why does this matter? Because pretty much all of Neil Gaiman’s stories follow this pattern.

A typical Neil Gaiman hero is bumbling, or at least unaware of what’s really going on for most of the book. In American Gods, Shadow becomes the errand boy for Mr. Wednesday (on Mr. Wednesday’s insistence), who has some strange habits and appears in the most coincidental places. While Shadow is very efficient in the real world, he has to operate somewhat like a blindman in the world of mythology Mr. Wednesday plunges him into. In contrast, the protagonist of Neverwhere, Richard Mayhew, doesn’t function too well in either world. And while Shadows finds himself seeked out to begin his adventure, Richard stumbles over his, in the form of Door, a girl from the Underground. Coraline also accidently encounters an Other World, although she proves to be quite clever. Tristran Thorn of Stardust, begins his adventure due to a whim of the girl he’s in love with, Fat Charlie (one of Anansi’s Boys) both belong to the bumblers category with Richard: obviously, Gaiman’s quite fond of creating characters who are a bit like fools.

Of course, it’s quite helpful to the reader to have main characters plunged into new worlds for the first time. That way, the reader learns the new rules along with the character: it seems natural for all of these rules, which would usually be assumed, to be told to an outsider. It also makes it more fun; the reader can share the sense of wonder, or fear, right along with the hero. And make no mistake, Gaiman’s faeries and gods aren’t soft and cuddly. Coraline must battle an Other Mother with long, curving fingers and black button eyes. Fat Charlie and his brother find themselves battling both the Bird Woman (who sends, among others, flamingos and vultures after them) and Tiger. Tristran must avoid an ancient witch-queen bent on cutting out the heart of the star he’s befriended, while Shadow and Richard face danger and difficulty after danger and difficulty. These are fairy tales of the old school, before Disney got his hands on them.

Gaiman excels at bringing the supernatural to life believably. The worlds he creates in each of his novels feel complete, as if they really do exist side-by-side with our everyday lives. He also has his plots down pat. The reader knows enough to know that the bumbling hero will triumph in the end, but that the way he gets there is going to be full of interesting twists and turns. Usually, he’s also strong in the area of characters (I’d argue that Stardust is an exception to this)-for me, the big test is if I can imagine the characters living after the book closes. If I close my eyes, I can see Richard, Shadow, Coraline, and Fat Charlie in situations Gaiman never wrote; all of them were that well developed. With the exception of Stardust, which focused much less on characterisation than normal (in my opinion, this was an intentional method to achieve the style Gaiman was going for), even Gaiman’s minor characters seem to leap off the page.

While his talent is consistent, his writing style tends to change from book to book. Reading multiple Gaiman books, the reader can see the way he plays with different approaches, evoking everything from a fairy tale in Stardust to a hard-boiled crime novel in American Gods. I find this one of the most appealing aspects of Gaiman: when I open a new book, I know I’ll get a well-written, engaging story, but I also have no idea what it’s going to sound like.

WordPress tells me that I’m almost at a thousand words, so I suppose I should wrap this up. If you haven’t read any Neil Gaiman before, you really should! I’m going to provide a few brief thoughts on each of the books I read, so that you can pick the one that sounds most appearling to you.
American Gods: a darker approach to urban fantasy, with many diversions and references to mythologies from all over the world, as I mentioned above its style is more hard-boiled, with Shadow driving across the northern Midwest of America with Mr. Wednesday, organising the old gods for a final showdown with the new ones (See Just Add Book’s review
Stardust: follows a more traditional fairy tale style; Tristran Thorn, part fae himself, must enter the land of faerie and bring a fallen star (who happens to be a young lady) back to his small British village of Wall; the characters aren’t as engaging as most Gaiman ones, but the work itself feels like cotton candy (in a good way) (See Andi of AndiLit’s review!)
Anansi Boys: a very comedic, verging in places on slapstick, tale of Fat Charlie and his part-god brother Spyder, it travels between England, Florida, and the Caribbean to tell a story based in African and Caribbean folklore; this one feels uplifting, like the hot sun on your face(also has the best description of a hangover I’ve ever read)
Neverwhere: imagines that there’s an alternate London Underground, the whole thing feels quite gritty as Richard Mayhew gets drawn into helping Door outwit the heartless assassins who killed her entire family
Coraline: nominally a children’s book, this one is very creepy (especially the illustrations); shorter than the rest, and despite its dark subject matter, it feels heroic. (See Yati of Finding Wonderland’s review!)
Preludes&Nocturnes: a graphic novel, the first I’ve ever read, I honestly didn’t enjoy it; I found the colours to be garish, the illustrations were often stomach-turning, and I wasn’t even sure in what order to read the panels! (to be fair, I’d never read a comic book before in my life) however, I really liked the last ‘episode’ of the eight, and the intro told me that that’s the one where Sandman found itself, so I’m going to give Vol. 2 a chance