Unparalled Imagination

"Everybody has ideas... People daydream constantly, people let their minds go walking." (Goodyear). By his own standards Neil Gaiman's mind is perpetually meandering along unexplored, untrodden paths. His work is disturbingly comic, fantastically sick, and so inventive no one can claim in hindsight 'I could have thought of that,' as we so often delude ourselves. Gaiman creates an entirely new world with every piece, worlds that are a "heady mixture of the everyday and the obscure" ("Neil Gaiman"). He weaves myth and fantasy into common life, turning views of the mundane world upside down. Often he will transform an existing story or concept into a haunting echo of the original, as when he demonizes the perfect fairytale image of Snow White in Snow, Glass, Apples (Gaiman, "Snow"), or in The Problem Of Susan where he portrays the inundated sadness of the adult Susan, the sole surviving child from The Chronicles of Narnia (Gaiman, "Problem"). Not every story he tells is rife with pain and darkness. He is starkly funny in several of his pieces and humor is a frequent visitor in many of his more grim works. In fact what first drew me to Neil Gaiman was not a morbid, unearthly tale, but rather I read first a hilarious piece entitled I, Cthulu (NeilGaiman.com) in which the great and terrible Cthulu dictates his autobiography to a fumbling human. Once a Gaiman fan, entirely a Gaiman fan.


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Gaiman, Neil. "The Problem Of Susan." Fragile Things. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. 181-190.

Gaiman, Neil. "Snow, Glass, Apples." Smoke and Mirrors. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Goodyear, Dana. "Kid Goth: Neil Gaiman's fantasies." The New Yorker. 25 January 2010. 2 April 2010. (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/25/100125fa_fact_goodyear).

"Neil Gaiman." Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volumes 42, 82. Gale Group, 2002.

NeilGaiman.com. 2010. Harper Collins Publishers. March 24, 2010. (http://www.neilgaiman.com).