We’re going in for some fantasy and a little bit of horror with this one, Obscurists. Today’s review is on Neil Gaiman’s “Neverwhere.”
***The Non-Spoiler part of this review***
What I love about this book:
The first thing that I love about this book is you never quite manage to get your bearings before it’s on to another weird and uncanny location. Like the protagonist, Richard Mayhew, as the audience follows him along throughout London below, we’re never sure what the next location will bring.
Also, this book is way creepier than I thought it would be, which keeps happening to me with every Neil Gaiman book I read. I think it’s because of how whimsically he writes everything with a dash of dry humor that always suckers me. It’s hard to explain what Gaiman’s stories feel like, but the closest I can think of is someone in an Easter Bunny costume. Soft and fluffy, joyfully playful, until you finally realize there is no one in the bunny costume, just a sentient swarm of bees somehow controlling it.
So yeah, a bit like that.
I love the inherent weirdness of that feeling, and when he makes the shift into threatening with his menacing characters, you absolutely believe they’re capable of anything.
What I don’t love about this book:
I like all of the characters in this novel, even our everyman protagonist Richard Mayhew. I don’t get why Mayhew wants to get back to his boring life so bad, other than the fact that London below is a pretty dangerous place. His fiancé was pretty heartless, and his job seemed stressful and unrewarding.
The motivations for all of the characters were fleshed out, and you understood why they were doing what they were doing—except for the two evil henchmen characters. They were just sadists and creepy because they like being sadists and creepy, which is uninteresting to me.
Without spoiling anything, the ending didn’t really happen where I thought, which seems to be another Gaiman thing that I could take or leave. In this, the end feels like it went on too long to get to its point.
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***The Spoiler part of this review***
***Ye be warned to turn back now***
The quick and dirty synopsis:
Richard Mayhew is living a perfectly ordinary life in London. He’s engaged to an ambitious, beautiful woman, and his job is firmly middle of the road. On their way to dinner—a very important dinner for Richard’s fiancé’s career—they encounter a badly injured young woman. Richard’s fiancé essentially just wants to leave her, but Richard, after hearing the young woman doesn’t want to go to a hospital for mysterious reasons, doesn’t hesitate. He scoops up the injured girl and takes her home to tend to her wounds, leaving his flabbergasted ex-fiancé on the sidewalk.