For example, in fairy tales, the hero or heroine often helps some poor, helpless-appearing person or creature who confers blessings and even magical powers upon his or her rescuer. Gaiman is nothing if not conversant with the tropes and conventions of folklore and fantasy literature, but he likes to come at them from a different, slantwise angle. Never yet having sampled this somewhat unusual concoction, a new Folio Society edition offered me a simply irresisible invitation to plunge into the “magic and the sewers and the dark,” exploring a fantasy master’s fictional origins. Fortunately, he simply decided to put anything that couldn’t go on screen into a book, and Neverwhere is the result. His first solo novel (after collaborating with Terry Pratchett on Good Omens) arose out of a 1996 BBC mini-series that, unsurprisingly, put some limits upon his imaginative scope with its budgetary constraints. I wouldn’t normally expect much of a book created as the novelization of a TV series, but in this case, you know-Neil Gaiman.
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