Once Upon A Time...
Why chicks dig author Neil Gaiman.
      by Tara O'Shea

And there is Death... coming soon to a theatre near you.

Gaiman has said in the past that one of his favorite thing about the Angels tours he has done to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is reading to a large audience of adults, some of whom haven't been read to since they were children. In a telephone interview a week before the first stop on the tour, I asked him what was the first book he remembered being read to him as a child.

"I would have been three, because of where we were living, and my mother bought--either both at the same time, or around the same time -- a children's Hiawatha, which is a retelling of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha with some of the verses in. And Pied Piper of Hamlin, the Browning poem. They would have been the first two things that I remember being read to me. Those Hiawatha rhythms -- those sort of 'By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water...' and 'Always the rats they....' that kind of stuff. It all sort of sits there."

What was the first book you remember reading to your own children?

"First book I read to my children that I remember particularly was a little thing called Catch the Red Bus, which my son Mike used to really like when he was, oh, two, about a family of bears -- they said they were bears, but I think the illustration made them look rather more like fuzzy mice -- going off and spending a day out. The first time I really remember getting into reading to them was probably reading them C.S. Lewis' Narnia books. I remember at the time the BBC was showing some Narnia stuff on the television. I was reading to Mike the same time we were watching this stuff, and I remember him turning to me one day and he said, 'You know, I think I like the books better,' he said, 'Dad, because the pictures in your head are better than the ones on the television.' And I thought, 'Oh good, I must be doing something right, then.'"

Since you emigrated with your family in 1992, what do you think has been the biggest change in how you perceive America?

"There is an on-going process of evaluation. In England one feels that everything that happens, happens below the surface. That what you see is not what you get. Then I came out to America, and for a while I assumed that everything was happening below the surface, which puzzled me enormously. And then I decided after a couple of years that actually it was simply 'What you see is what you get,' and the surface is the picture, although it goes for an incredibly long way. Then slowly I came to conclusion that actually you have a lot of things going on beneath the surface, that are mostly unsaid, and the trouble is that many of them are not just unsaid, but they are entirely unknown. I suppose that was what went into American Gods, the new novel."

In addition to American Gods and The Wolves In The Walls, fans can also look forward to a novel called Coraline, about a little girl who lives in an old house that has been subdivided into flats and has doors that open onto brick walls except for one, which opens onto another world where a woman who is but isn't Coraline's mother wants Coraline to stay with her forever. Children who have read the novel think of it as a fantastic adventure while the adults have nightmares, a fact that seems to entertain Gaiman to no end.

Neil Gaiman and Jill Thompson in Chicago. Photo © Barrett McGivney

"There's a lot of stuff [Harper Collins] are putting off until American Gods comes out," he says. "I, of course, am just going 'Why don't you bring it all out? C'mon, just bring it all out.' And they're going, 'No, no. We have a plan. We have a strategy.' 'Okay, yeah. But just bring it out. No one will mind.'"

Gaiman has described American Gods as a road trip novel packed full of unemployed, unloved, depressed gods who emigrated with and were then abandoned by their believers, and that novel is a comment on the myths of America with places like Pittsburgh in the beginning and end, and Wild Wisconsin in the middle.

"It sort of starts off as a road trip. I'm not sure what it becomes after that. Wild Wisconsin's in the middle, and then it gets very strange. The Wisconsin stuff is fun; the Wisconsin stuff is particularly fun just because I keep getting the response from editors in places like Los Angeles and New York, "This is so... so weird... This is so -- I've never read anything like this!" and I'm going, "Well, actually, that's because this is a huge country with all sorts of interesting stuff going on. And you've missed this. And it's odd. And it has this sort of -- it's not even Twin Peaks-y kind of feel. It's much more realistic than a Twin Peaks kind of feel. And it's fun. It was almost like -- I thought, "Gosh, this is interesting. This is what it would be like to write a mainstream novel, some of the stuff in the middle. Except for the murders. Except for the weird things going on."

I like the idea of gods pumping gas.

"They're fun, and they're doing all sorts of things. They're basically getting by. But it wound up essentially, for the most part I suppose, being a novel about the continuous emigrant experience dating back sixteen thousand years."

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