Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. To order a copy for £7.64, go to or call 03. View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman (Headline, £8.99).He is, at heart, the best kind of child reader: an adventurous one, and one willing to learn. He is charming, enthusiastic, full of wonder.
Pieces about friends and collaborators – Alan Moore, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett – are relaxed, chatty, anecdotal (and, in the cases of Adams and Pratchett, who died before their time, melancholy). We find out about the shoulders on which he stood – those of Will “The Spirit” Eisner, Diana Wynne Jones and Brian Aldiss, about whom he writes passionately and searchingly.
It is also a great way of learning about the history of comics, science fiction and fantasy. This book is an excellent way of getting a purchase on the man who could be said to have almost single-handedly revived the comic genre, or made it respectable. ” But as he says here, it is a miserable imagination that allows itself contact only with other similar imaginations. It was the night when, we were assured, the dead walked, when all the things of night were loosed, and, sensibly, believing this, we children stayed at home listened to the twigs rake and patter at the window glass. Gaiman lives in the US now, but his imagination is, I think, very English, and very rural at that: “When I was growing up in England, Hallowe’en was no time for celebration. The problem was that it had already been written.”) The other books he adored were CS Lewis’s Narnia tales (with reservations about The Last Battle), and – this came as a surprise – GK Chesterton’s stories, particularly those of Father Brown, and The Man Who Was Thursday. and I wanted to write The Lord of the Rings. (“I came to the conclusion that The Lord of the Rings was the best book that ever could be written. You can see the cities, the dividing inky waters, can’t you? There is also something in the image that reminds me strongly of The Lord of the Rings, a book which he devoured as a child. That, I think, is very good, even if it does not quite bear sustained scrutiny (you still have to walk around Horror on your own, surely?) and it also shows how adept he is at delivering scripts to be drawn up by artists. The Horror place is a rather more dangerous place, or it should be: you can walk around Fantasy alone.”
Here is the opening of his introduction to an edition of HP Lovecraft stories: “If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water. I can see how this could get irritating, but it is at the heart of his technique and success.
It’s the careful expository tone of a tale told to children, of a good, scary story that will keep them listening. His tone of voice is readily identifiable.
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