Now you see him, now you don’t

With new book The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman for the first time does his “unreliable autobiography thing” at novel length.

By David Larsen In Books

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20th June, 2013

Neil Gaiman is not co-operating. I have long suspected him of having a deep-seated horror of mortality: look at all the immortals in his books. Look at the friendly, unthreatening avatar of Death in his Sandman graphic novel series. (A series that is ultimately about both immortality and suicide, by the way.) Death as a cheerful goth chick with pet goldfish? I call that overcompensation. Gaiman calls it “telling stories”. The immortals crop up so often because he likes long time horizons, he says. More interesting. And he was not traumatised as a child by the suicide of a stranger ...

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