Five Best Neil Gaiman Books

With over forty titles in his bibliography (which apparently continues to grow), Neil Gaiman was a constant part of my childhood and remains among – if not at the forefront of – my favorite authors. And with the recent success of Netflix’s adaptation of The sand man, I found myself revisiting some classics and his books that I still love today. If you just watched The sand man and looking to read more of Gaiman’s work and explore his little worlds, then you’ve come to the right place!

The ocean at the end of the road

Published in 2013, The ocean at the end of the road is as intriguing and captivating as its title sounds. Told from the perspective of an anonymous narrator, Gaiman explores concepts of our unreliable memories and childhood innocence, all, of course, interwoven with fantastical elements. The story essentially follows the anonymous narrator as he returns to his old hometown for a funeral and finds himself captivated once again, as he was in his youth, by a farm that stood at the end of a road where he once met a girl named Lettie Hempstock, who claimed the pond near their house was actually an ocean. As he stands by this pond, he finds his memory impaired and the past he had once seemingly forgotten floods back to him.

The Hempstock name might sound familiar if you’ve read some of Gaiman’s other work (some of which is also included in this list), as the family made several appearances in his books. Otherwise, well, Ocean is the perfect read for someone trying to find either a good first book to start their work on or a story to get them out of a reading slump. (It is less than 200 pages.)

good omens

Where to start good omens? First published in 1990 and co-written by the late Terry Pratchett (RIP), good omens‘ the full title is actually Good Omens: The Beautiful and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch and is a hilarious tale of the coming of the end of days. The story follows Aziraphale (an angel) and Crowley (a demon) and the strange friendship they have formed over millennia, as well as the equally surprising and strange way they have come to live among humanity. . Somewhere down the line, the forces of evil inform Crowley of their greatest and most important plan to finally win their war against good, aka Heaven: Birth of the Antichrist, where Crowley is literally charged with duty. deliver the baby meant to signal the apocalypse, only for a mix-up to occur (unbeknownst to him) at the hospital.

The novel mostly follows Crowley and Aziraphale as they try to figure out how to save the world without the forces of good or evil finding out (because here even everyone in heaven wants the world to end because , well, that’s what the instructions say). It also features two equally funny subplots that feature the Antichrist growing up in the wrong home and village, and the legendary Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse preparing for the end times.

Never

Never has had several adaptations over the years and is known to be Gaiman’s first solo book. It also introduces the beautiful and strange world of London Below, a kind of parallel universe that exists “under” the city of London, where supernatural beings mingle and exist. The novel also features other real-life locations with that little twist, like Harrods Floating Market, Blackfriars, and the British Museum.

As Gaiman aptly puts it, “Neverwhere” is the London for people who have fallen through the cracks, much like the novel’s protagonist, Richard Mayhew, a businessman who lived a relatively boring but normal life before. to be thrust into the middle of two parallel universes, otherworldly assassins, hunters and the Marquis of Carabas.

Gaiman announced in 2017 that he was writing a sequel to Never entitled Seven Sisters, although we have not yet received any updates or information on release dates. He did, however, write a short story to accompany the book titled How the Marquis got his coat back.

Stardust

Stardust features Gaiman’s prose and world-building at its peak. Published in 1999, Stardust has a darker Victorian fairy tale atmosphere unlike his other works and is set in the rural English village of Wall, where a great stone wall runs through the entire town and separates our world from that of the fairies. Once every nine years a market is held on the fairy side of the wall, and there a young Dunstan Thorn meets a fairy woman named Una, with whom he is captivated and spends a night.

Several months later, Dunstan is surprised to find a baby in a basket left on his doorstep but immediately knows it is his and Una’s son, whom he names Tristran. Years later, we watch as Tristran grows up and embarks on a journey to reclaim a fallen star in order to win the heart of his beloved Victoria. True to Gaiman fashion, the prose interweaves several other tales of multiple characters also attempting to find the fallen star. Captivating and exciting, Stardust is a perfectly paced and romantic story that left me in tears.

His adaptation also received an equal number of great reviews, which I think speaks for itself. Did I mention it stars our favorite Daredevil, Charlie Cox?

The Cemetery Book

The story of how Gaiman invented The Graveyard Book is already interesting: he had always wanted to write something like Ruyard Kipling The jungle Book and one day he saw his son riding his tricycle through a graveyard and thought it would be interesting to put his story there. The Graveyard Book tells the story of a young boy called Bod (short for “Nobody” because “He looks like no one but himself”) who is raised by ghosts and lives in a graveyard. As a toddler, his family was murdered at home, except for himself, as he managed to crawl out of his crib and find his way out of the house and all the way up onto a nearby hill, which housed the local cemetery.

From there, the spirits of the resident ghosts took pity on him as the spirit of his deceased mother asked them to tend to him. After much deliberation, the ghosts agreed, and Bod was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Owens, believing they were the first to find the baby. The ghosts are assisted by the cemetery caretaker, Silas, who also serves as Bod’s guardian. The novel progresses through Bod’s childhood and early teens and, in essence, is a sort of macabre coming-of-age fantasy that will leave you both haunted and touched.

(featured image: Netflix)

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