Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

From Goodreads:

Under the streets of London there's a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.

Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: Neverwhere.


I read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book at some point and loved it. I also read American Gods and thought it very good. He's got such a rabid cult following that I assumed I would love just about anything he wrote. But....I didn't.

Neverwhere was just a little too dark for me, I guess. The characters were plenty engaging (seeing a publicity shot for the radio broadcast really helped me envision them) and the plot was adequately twisty but I think the biggest part of the problem is that I couldn't see myself in the world of Neverwhere I wouldn't want to. It's a dark, violent, unfriendly place and apparently I like my alternative universes a little more sunshiney. Oh well.

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