Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

From the Publisher

Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her—and the life he knows vanishes like smoke.

Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won't stop for him, his hundred rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.

For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the cause of her family's slaughter, and in doing so preserve this strange underworld kingdom from the malevolence that means to destroy it. And with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew must now join the Lady Door's entourage in their determined—and possibly fatal—quest.

For the dread journey ever-downward—through bizarre anachronisms and dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time—is Richard's final hope, his last road back to a "real" world that is growing disturbingly less real by the minute.

If Tim Burton reimagined The Phantom of the Opera, if Jack Finney let his dark side take over, if you rolled the best workof Clive Barker, Peter Straub and Caleb Carr into one, you still would have something that fell far short of Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE. It is a masterful debut novel of darkly hypnotic power, and one of the most absorbing reads to come along in years.

Pixel Planet

...a dark, twisted sort of fable that anyone that has a passing interest in fantasy fiction should pick up and read immediately. Neverwhere is one of the best books that I’ve read this year.

Stephen King

[Gaiman] is, simply put, a treasure house of story, and we are lucky to have him in any media.

Tori Amos

I didn't ever want this book to end. . . Hunter, Islington, Door — these characters are part of my life now. I see them when I turn corners.

Publishers Weekly

Gaiman assumes the role of narrator for his latest book, offering an intimate reading that steals one's attention almost immediately and keeps the listener involved throughout. As the story is based in the United Kingdom, Gaiman is a quintessential raconteur for the tale, with his charming Scottish brogue instilling life and spirit into the central character of Richard Mayhew. Pitch perfect, with clear pronunciation, Gaiman invites listeners into his living room for a fireside chat, offering a private and personal experience that transcends the limitations of traditional narration. The author knows his story through and through, capturing the desired emotion and audience reaction in each and every scene. His characters are unique, with diverse personalities and narrative approaches, and Gaiman offers a variety of dialects and tones. The reading sounds more like a private conversation among friends with Gaiman providing the convincing and likable performance the writing deserves. A Harper Perennial paperback (Reviews, May 19, 1997). (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

London businessman Richard Mayhew sees an injured, homeless girl on the street one evening and is compelled to bring her back to his apartment. In this debut novel by Gaiman, author of the wildly successful graphic novel series The Sandman, the girl, whose name is Door, ushers Richard into a strange new world. She communicates with rats and pigeons and is amazed to find herself in what she calls "London Above." When she leaves, however, Richard's ordinary life vanishes with her. He discovers that he is virtually invisible on the street, in his office, even to his fiance. Believing that only Door can help him, he finds his way to London Below, a menacing, magical netherworld located in the sewers, tunnels and abandoned Underground stations. Inhabited "by the people who fell through the cracks in the world," London Below is equal parts fantasy, nightmare and ragged medieval court life. There, Mayhew joins Door, a female warrior called Hunter and an opportunistic marquis on a quest to discover why Door's family was executed. Villains abound, including a pair of courteous but malevolent assassins. Gaiman blends history and legend to fashion a traditional tale of good versus evil, replete with tarnished nobility, violence, wizardry, heroism, betrayal, monsters and even a fallen angel. The result is uneven. His conception of London Below is intriguing, but his characters are too obviously symbolic (Door, for example, possesses the ability to open anything). Also, the plot seems a patchwork quilt of stock fantasy images. Adapted from Gaiman's screenplay for a BBC series, this tale would work better with fewer words and more pictures. 125,000 first printing; major ad/promo; author tour. (July)

Library Journal

In his first full-length novel, Gaiman, the comic-book mastermind, brings his talents to the black-and-white world of books, eschewing the darkly elegant illustrations that are a trademark of his comics. However, this journey to yet another fantastical realm is full of haunting images just the same. The story revolves around Richard Mayhew, a bumbling young businessman, who is about to discover a new side of London after helping a wounded girl named Door. He is trapped in an alternate dimension, known as London Below, or the Underground. Once he steps into it, he finds that his normal life no longer exists. The only chance of getting his old life back is to accompany Door on a dangerous mission across the Underground. Like adults stumbling through the pages of a bizarre children's story, Gaiman's likable protagonists fight off the sinister villains of this nebulous underworld. Shards of the concrete world continually pierce the surreal surroundings, as Gaiman weaves a link between the two dimensions of London. Gaiman's gift for mixing the absurd with the frightful give this novel the feeling of a bedtime story with adult sophistication. Readers will find themselves as unable to escape this tale as the characters themselves. Highly recommended.Erin Cassin, formerly with "Library Journal"

Kirkus Reviews

Some of the best pure storytelling around these days is being produced in the critically suspect genre of fantasy, and this exuberantly inventive first full-length novel, by the co-creator of the graphic series The Sandman (1996), is a state-of-the-art example.

The protagonist, determinedly unheroic Richard Mayhew, is a young man up from the provinces and living in London, where he has found both job success and a lissome fiancée, Jessica. Soon, however, Richard meets a mysterious old woman who prophesies he'll embark on an adventure that "starts with doors." Sure enough, his fate becomes entwined with that of a beautiful waiflike girl who calls herself Door, and who is in flight from a pair of ageless hired assassins and in pursuit of the reason behind the murder of her family. Suddenly wrenched away from his quotidian life (people can no longer see or hear him), Richard follows Door underground to an alternative "London Below," where "people who have fallen through the cracks" live in a rigidly stratified mock-feudal society that parallels that of London Above. A parade of instructors and guides brings Richard and Door ever closer to understanding why her father was marked for death by the rulers of London Below, and prepares Richard to do battle with the (wonderfully loathsome) Great Beast of London. Altogether, Gaiman's story ending is both a terrific surprise and a perfectly logical culmination of Richard's journey into the darkest recesses of his civilization and himself. The novel is consistently witty, suspenseful, and hair-raisingly imaginative in its contemporary transpositions of familiar folk and mythic materials (one can read Neverwhere as a postmodernist punk Faerie Queene).

Readers who've enjoyed the fantasy work of Tim Powers and William Browning Spencer won't want to miss this one. And, yes, Virginia, there really are alligators in those sewers—and Gaiman makes you believe it.

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read a Sample Chapter

Interviews & Essays

Neil Gaiman: Frantic negotiations are currently going on to buy NEVERWHERE (the movie rights). To be completely honest, I have no favorite actors, the characters are so real to me, it is difficult to pinpoint an actor and actress. If anybody, I could play Richard, but I have no plans of acting.

Neil Gaiman: If it has to include both categories, the finest author out there is Jonathan Carroll, who is now being published in trade paperback, normally in the literature shelves. Books such as SLEEPING IN FLAME, A CHILD ACROSS THE SKY, and OUTSIDE THE DOG MUSEUM.

Neil Gaiman: I think de Carabas probably, in my head, originally began life as a kind of Richard O'Brien character. But most characters in NEVERWHERE came out of place names. I wondered what the Earl would be like in Earl's Court or the Angel in Islington. In the Marquis I wanted a character who was, in his mind at least, always one step ahead of the plot.

Neil Gaiman: What I prefer is telling stories and every method of telling stories. Whether comics, TV, film, radio drama, short stories, poems, or novels. They all have their up sides and down sides. But for me, the primary goal is always the act of telling the story.

Neil Gaiman: I think one cannot read a book about serial killers or the Holocaust without realizing that evil exists in reality worse than anything one will encounter in fiction. Croup and Vandemar, however, are cartoon evil characters. Like most of the people in NEVERWHERE, they know their roles in the book and are proud, delighted, and possibly even honored to be the bad guys. As Mr. Croup puts it, they don't have any redeeming features.

Neil Gaiman: The story of Sandman is really over -- you'll find it in the ten volumes of graphic novels that begin with PRELUDES AND NOCTURNES and ends with THE WAKE. It's one story that took eight years to tell and 2,500 pages, and for now I am very content to leave it that way.

Neil Gaiman: Stardust, which is a four-volume adult fairy story and will be very heavily illustrated by Charles Vess, will be published in six weekly intervals starting in October. No news on Miracle Man, although the next issue has been finished for almost four years now.

Neil Gaiman: The comic strip I most enjoyed and which probably influences me today was Feiffer. I practically learned to read on the Feiffer collection THE EXPLAINERS, and I think the comic book that I most enjoyed was the original Swamp Thing.

Neil Gaiman: Two noes.... If people want to see "Neverwhere" the TV series, which is flawed but fun, they should write to whatever station you would like to see it on (Sci-Fi, PBS) and let them know. I am only doing the stops on the tour.

Neil Gaiman: The American version of NEVERWHERE is about 10,000 words longer than the English; it has a few extra scenes and a lot more description. However, it lost one of the prologues (which can be found on the Avon web site), and it lost some of the jokes.

Neil Gaiman: Well, our old working relationship consisted of one of us phoning the other every night at 2am because we were the only people we knew who would be up at that time, and we would see each other every few weeks. Now when we do things together it is in shorter, more concentrated bursts, but we still delight in working with each other, and I loved doing THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH. We have a book called DUST COVERS coming out toward the end of this year.

Neil Gaiman: There are people you don't want to collaborate with, because you want to see what they do and because what they do is so unique. Authors like Jonathan Carroll or Iain Sinclair or Gene Wolfe are people I want to read, not to write with.

Neil Gaiman: I have no plans to write another monthly ongoing series at this time. But it is possible a few years down the road. Most of the work I am currently doing in comics is very short. Sandman took me almost a decade to write, so these days I like things I can finish by teatime.

Neil Gaiman: I don't know. Every time I write a good angel, I think I've got them out of my system forever, and then I'll turn around and another angel has crept in. They are like roaches. All I can do is apologize.

Neil Gaiman: Yes, since 1991.

Neil Gaiman: I get to keep more of the royalties. It is difficult to explain and probably bears the same kind of relationship that masturbation does to sex.

Neil Gaiman: There is a "Destiny" series, which I don't have anything to do with, coming soon. I plan to write a "Delirium" series once I finish writing STARDUST.

Neil Gaiman: I was planning to write a "Jack in the Beanstalk" retelling at some point. We'll see. Avon plans to release a short story collection next year, tentatively entitled SMOKE AND MIRRORS.

Neil Gaiman: Thanks for the congratulations. The bit I thought was silly, was we got the award on Saturday night and on Sunday morning, they changed the rules to prevent it from ever happening again. My main comment on censorship is that I am in favor neither of it nor of any self-appointed censors. Which is why I've given so much time and energy to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which fights for First Amendment rights. I just had a chapbook called ON CATS AND DOGS published by Dreamhaven Books, profits from which will go to the CBLDF.

Neil Gaiman: "Cerebus," "From Hell" and "It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken" (by Seth) are three of my current favorites.

Neil Gaiman: An outline for "Death" the movie is sitting on somebody's desk at Warner Bros. But everything depends on what happens with and to the "Sandman" film (which I am not involved with).

Neil Gaiman: I strongly suspect that the world of NEVERWHERE is the world of Sandman, but I could be wrong.

Neil Gaiman: Thank you for having me, and thanks to barnesandnoble.com, which has been so supportive with all my books.

Reading Group Guide

Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a boring career in finance and a pretty but demanding fiancée. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her, and the life he knows vanishes in an instant.

Several hours later, the girl is gone, too. And by the following morning, Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won't stop for him, his fiancée doesn't recognize him, and his landlord rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness -- to a city of monsters and saints, assassins and angels -- that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.

For the dreaded journey ever-downward -- through bizarre anachronisms and dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time -- is Richard's final hope, his last road back to a "real world" that is growing disturbingly less real by the minute.

Discussion Questions

1. Who is Richard Mayhew? What defines his everyday life in London? How would you characterize his relationship with Jessica? Who does he encounter on the street who alters the course of his life? How is this event predicted by the old fortuneteller at his going away party?
   
   
2. Who are Mr. Vandemar and Mr. Croup? Describe their personalities. Did you find any of their appearances in the book terrifying or humorous? Which ones? Who are they searching for at the beginning of the book?
   
   
3. Who is the Lady Door? What are some of her unusual powers? What creatures help Door gain access to the marquis de Carabas? What is her quest?
   
   
4. How would you describe the marquis de Carabas? Did he seem entirely trustworthy to you? With whom does he collude? What is the significance of the silver box he gives to Old Bailey? What transformation does de Carabas undergo in Neverwhere?
   
   
5. Where does Richard meet Hunter? How does she help him in the London Below? How does she react to the disappearance of Anaesthesia? Whom does she vow to protect? How is that pledge ultimately compromised? Were you surprised by her betrayal?
   
   
6. How would you describe London Below? What serves as its primary mode of transportation? Who populates it? What regular occasion serves as a kind of neutral meeting ground?
   
   
7. Name some of the more eccentric characters Richard Mayhew encounters in London Below. Were there any aspects of this region that you found particularly fascinating or easy to envision?
   
   
8. Did you feel sympathy for any character in particular? Did you feel revulsion for any of the characters? Which ones?
   
   
9. Of the special powers enjoyed by Islington, Door, de Carabas, and Hunter, which ones did you find most marvelous? Which abilities would you like to possess? How did Richard interact with this motley crew?
   
   
10. Were you surprised by Richard's decision at the end of Neverwhere? Why do you think he made such a choice?

About the author

Neil Gaiman is the critically acclaimed author of the novels American Gods (winner of the 2002 Hugo Award for Best Novel), Stardust (winner of the American Library Association's Alex Award), and the award-winning Sandman series of graphic novels, as well as Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of short fiction, and Coraline (winner of the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novella), a tale for readers of all ages. His first book for children, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, illustrated by Dave McKean, was one of Newsweek's Best Children's Books of 1997. In 2003, Gaiman and McKean teamed up again to produce another illustrated children's book, The Wolves in the Walls. His small press story collection, Angels & Visitations, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and won the International Horror Critics Guild Award for Best Collection. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in America.

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

She had been running for days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages and tunnels. She was hungry, and exhausted, and more tired than a body could stand, and each successive door was proving harder to open. After four days of flight, she had found a hiding place, a tiny stone burrow, under the world, where she would be safe, or so she prayed, and at last she slept.

Mr. Croup had hired Ross at the last Floating Market, which had been held in Westminster Abbey. "Think of him," he told Mr. Vandemar, "as a canary."

"Sings?" asked Mr. Vandemar.

"I doubt it; I sincerely and utterly doubt it." Mr. Croup ran a hand through his lank orange hair. "No, my fine friend, I was thinking metaphoncally -- more along the lines of the birds they take down mines." Mr. Vandemar nodded, comprehension dawning slowly: yes, a canary. Mr. Ross had no other resemblance to a canary. He was huge-almost as big as Mr. Vandemar -- and extremely grubby, and quite hairless, and he said very little, although he had made a point of telling each of them that he liked to kill things, and he was good at it; and this amused Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar. But he was a canary, and he never knew it. So Mr. Ross went first, in his filthy T-shirt and his crusted blue-jeans, and Croup and Vandemar walked behind him, in their elegant black suits.

There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar's eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelery; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.

A rustle in the tunnel darkness; Mr. Vandemar's knife was in his hand, and then it was no longer in his hand, and it was quivering gently almost thirty feet away. He walked over to his knife and picked it up by the hilt. There was a gray rat impaled on the blade, its mouth opening and closing impotently as the life fled. He crushed its skull between finger and thumb.

"Now, there's one rat that won't be telling any more tales," said Mr. Croup. He chuckled at his own joke. Mr. Vandemar did not respond. "Rat. Tales. Get it?"

Mr. Vandemar pulled the rat from the blade and began to munch on it, thoughtfully, head first. Mr. Croup slapped it out of his hands. "Stop that," he said. Mr. Vandemar put his knife away, a little sullenly. "Buck up," hissed Mr. Croup, encouragingly.

"There will always be another rat. Now: onward. Things to do. People to damage."

Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.

It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names -- Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch -- and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the needs of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.

When he had first arrived, he had found London huge, odd, fundamentally incomprehensible, with only the Tube map, that elegant multicolored topographical display of underground railway lines and stations, giving it any semblance of order. Gradually he realized that the Tube map was a handy fiction that made life easier but bore no resemblance to the reality of the shape of the city above. It was like belonging to a political party, he thought once, proudly, and then, having tried to explain the resemblance between the Tube map and politics, at a party, to a cluster of bewildered strangers, he had decided in the future to leave political comment to others.

He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more useful), to comprehend the city, a process that accelerated when he realized that the actual City of London itself was no bigger than a square mile, stretching from Aldgate in the east to Fleet Street and the law courts of the Old Bailey in the west, a tiny municipality, now home to London's financial institutions, and that that was where it had all begun.

Two thousand years before, London had been a little Celtic village on the north shore of the Thames, which the Romans had encountered, then settled in. London had grown, slowly, until, roughly a thousand years later, it met the tiny Royal City of Westminster immediately to the west, and, once London Bridge had been built, London touched the town of Southwark directly across the river, and it continued to grow, fields and woods and marshland slowly vanishing beneath the flourishing town, and it continued to expand, encountering other little villages and hamlets as it grew, like Whitechapel and Deptford to the east, Hammersmith and Shepherd's Bush to the west, Camden and Islington in the north, Battersea and Lambeth across the Thames to the south, absorbing all of them, just as a pool of mercury encounters and incorporates smaller beads of mercury, leaving only their names behind.