He's never gonna top Good Omens

So I've recently discovered Neil Gaiman. Well, not so much discovered, as actually gotten around to reading him. Long ago, I read Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett. At the time, I was a much larger fan of Terry Pratchett, because he's much funnier and concentrates on fantasy writing, while Neil Gaiman is much grittier.

Anyway, I picked up American Gods a few days ago. It's a lot of fun, kind of a semi-literal depiction of religious and cultural myths clashing with the modern world and American attitudes. Unfortunately...it's been done before. Terry Pratchett's Small Gods capitalized on the same idea, except it was much funnier.

Today, I picked up his first big novel, Neverwhere. Now, this was an ADDICTIVE book. I read the majority of it in one sitting. It's kind of a Pan's Labyrinth story, or an Alice in Wonderland, where a completely normal person is thrown into a mythic world where he's completely unequipped to deal with his new reality. Unfortunately, I had the nagging thought stuck in my head that it would make a totally bitchin' movie. And it would. So much that, looking back at it, the entire thing seems kind of like a glorified screenplay. I think that the problem with it is that the visuals are so striking in the book and the plot convolutions are so simple that it does seem much like a Hollywood movie.

In the end, I kind of see Neil Gaiman as the Stephen King of modern-world fantasy. All of his stuff is good and it really draws you in, but at the end of the day, you look back and see how completely formulaic it all is. And I'm sure I'll eventually read more of his stuff, even if he's not quite as clever or original as he seems to think he is.

EDIT: As it turns out, Neverwhere started out as a TV show on BBC. It all makes sense, now...