Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

For a geek, I've come into surprisingly minimal contact with Neil Gaiman, and wasn't that compelled by what I knew of - I thought Stardust (book) was weird, Coraline (film or book) has never appealed to me and his Doctor Who episode was deeply disappointing. That said, I thought the idea behind Neverwhere was so interesting that it was worth trying anyway, and it made me finally understand what all the Neil Gaiman fuss is about.

It's been a good couple of weeks since I finished it, so my memories of it are a touch rustier than I would like, though I tried to refresh them with a goodreads and TV Tropes fest.

The kind of imagination that just pulls a load of creativity from nothing is absolute genius, but I have a soft spot for that other kind of imagination; the one that takes completely ordinary and mundane things and elevates them to a level of Awesome. The more boring and everyday the root, the better the result. The entire concept of London Below is basically Neil Gaiman doing this with a London Tube map.

I love me a good twist, and I particularly love a good ooh-there's-a-traitor-but-who-amongst-the-Motley-Group-is-it? I may simply be losing my touch with predicting twists, but I was completely thrown off Twist Number One by a cleverly-executed red herring, and Twist Number Two came so far out of left field, I hadn't even considered it.

I have a soft spot for Mr-Normal-Everyman-accidentally-lands-in-craziness stories; I once watched a documentary where a very astute person said that all the best tales are about an Ordinary person thrown into an Extraordinary situation, or an Extraordinary person dumped somewhere Ordinary. Neverwhere is a perfect example of the former.

But on to the stuff I didn't like... Psychic dreams. *blows raspberry* Neil Gaiman's subtlety is otherwise way beyond this, but there are a lot of teasers in which various characters have a dream that heavily hints at what may happen later on in the book.

This is kind of clutching at straws, but I prefer bad guys who are evil for a reason, rather than just evil because they are evil. That said, there is a new level of bone-chilling-ness about this particular straight-up evil.

****

(Side-note: this is a thoroughly charming review of Neverwhere which I completely agreed with: http://impossibletosay.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/neil-gaimans-neverwhere-the-reality-of-imagination/)