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Monday, August 26, 2002 Interview - Irish Times Posted by lucy_anne at 3:00 AM PDT | Comments (0) Donald Clarke; "Sandman, bring me a bad dream"; Irish Times; August 26, 2002; p.8. 'I remember being taken down to the cellar where they were all waiting for us," Neil Gaiman says, his voice dropping to an ominous rumble. "Each boy would go in for about 15 minutes and then the next would go in. So, after two hours waiting, I went in and he said, 'An interesting set of test results, Neil. What do you want to do?' "I said, 'I want to write American comics.' Well, he looked at me as if I'd just waved a kipper at him. He stared at me for a bit - a pause that went on for an uncomfortably long time - and said, 'Have you ever thought about accountancy?' " The theatrical manner in which Gaiman tells the story of his teenage encounter with sinister career advisers is characteristic of the man and his work. He doesn't quite begin each answer with "It was a dark and stormy night", but the Hampshire-born author of the unsettling new children's book Coraline makes no attempt to contain his storytelling instincts. Those instincts have held him in good stead. Giving two fingers to the men in the cellar, Gaiman left school, played around with journalism for a while and then joined talents like Alan Moore and Belfast's Garth Ennis in forwarding the pocket revolution that brought comics to the brink of respectability in the late 1980s and early 1990s. "That movement makes more sense in retrospect," Gaiman says. "All those things need a genius and ours was Alan Moore (London-based author of wildly imaginative graphic novels such as Watchmen and From Hell). He really was sui generis. He could have done anything, but chose this medium because he loved it. "In America, comics were the landscape - they were everywhere. But over here, American comics were like postcards from Oz. They had fire hydrants, pizza parlours and sky scrapers in them. For us fire hydrants and sky scrapers were every bit as strange as super-heroes flying through the air. For us that world remained strange. They'd go into our brains in the same place that, say, a Dennis Potter play would go in." Gaiman made his name with the epic fantasy the Sandman. Beginning in 1988, the monthly comic ran for another eight years and is now published in 10 dense, vividly illustrated compendiums. The titular protagonist is the personification of the human dream world - a sad-eyed eternal around whom Gaiman spins expansive, but neatly structured, tales. "I met somebody recently who is doing a PhD on it," he says. "They all seem to think that I set out to write a classic work in 10 volumes. I have to explain that there were no graphic novels when I started out. Old comics went straight into the bargain bin." But, as time progressed, Gaiman began to realise that the Sandman was gathering a more permanent following: "It started out that our audience was 16-year-old boys. Then we acquired a substantial female readership. That hadn't happened before. Then the 40-year-olds began turning up at signings. But I really knew it was getting serious when people began arriving with Sandman tattoos. On one occasion, this guy got me to sign his arm beneath his tattoo. He came back after the signing and he had my signature tattooed on his arm: there was still liquid skin and blood attached to it. And then I thought: now this is different!" He shudders. But with his leather jacket bulging full of pens and his shaggy black hair falling over his eyes, the 41-year-old author still seems very much of that world. And he makes no attempt to distance himself from the comic fraternity. Nonetheless, in recent years, he has increasingly devoted his time to film, TV and fiction. Do the publication of 2001's chunky novel American Gods and the well-reviewed Coraline mark an attempt to join the mainstream? "That question used to piss me off," he says. "Shortly after I'd finished Neverwhere and Stardust, my first two novels, people were coming up to me and saying: 'How does it feel to be doing serious work?' "I used to get quite stroppy about it. Sandman is 2,000 pages long, it took me 4000 pages of script to write those pages, it took me eight years to write. That is serious work! I didn't leave comics because I wanted to gain respectability. I left comics because there were certain skills I wished to gain. I wanted to teach myself how to do those things." (Considering all that braggadocio about the size of the piece, it is perhaps unsurprising that Norman Mailer is such a Sandman fan.) But though the media may have changed, Gaiman's voice remains consistent. His stories tend to suppose a slippery supernatural undercurrent beneath the most mundane of events. In the Sandman, teenagers play football while Death, in the form of a sultry female Goth, chats them up. In American Gods, Odin and his fellow Nordic deities work in diners and gas stations. And in Coraline, a passageway leads a young girl into a disturbingly twisted version of her own world. Written for his own daughters, the slim volume took him over a decade to complete. "It reminds me of a cliche," he says, in storytelling mode again. "The baker's family always lacks bread. The cobbler's family always lack shoes. The doctor's family are the last to get treated. If professionally what you do is write, then something you are doing in your own time doesn't get done. "I showed it to an editor in the early 1990s and he said: 'You do realise this is unpublishable. It's horror for children and you can't do that. And you seem to have written a book that adults and children will both like. You can't publish a book for adults and children.' " A raised eyebrow acknowledges the unmentioned Ms J.K. Rowling. "We had to wait for the landscape to change. I'd like to say that I was prescient back then. But actually I just wanted to finish my book." The world that Coraline encounters features living toys, hordes of rats and a malign variation of the girl's mother who seeks to poke her eyes out with a needle. It is fairly grim stuff. "In America a lot of the interviews were about how dark the book was," Gaiman says. "Over here, nobody is asking that. I think partly that is because two real young girls have just been killed by monsters. There's a realisation that presenting kids with a fuzzy, Barney-flavoured world where everything ends in a big hug is not necessarily the best thing. "In Hansel and Gretel, there is war and famine at the beginning. And the two children's parents abandon them because they cannot afford to feed them. A witch tries to fatten them up and they are only saved when she is pushed into an oven. Children have never had a problem with this. There are good lessons here: your parents may one day find you expendable, not all adults mean you well." One is reminded of cross-generational novelist Philip Pullman's recent complaints that contemporary adult fiction is afraid to address the big moral and philosophical issues. "I think he's right," Gaiman says. "And story as well. Stephen King, a few years ago, sounded off about modern fiction: he said it was beautifully written, but there was no story. He said that it was like meeting a beautiful woman who is stupid. But plot and story are deemed important in children's fiction. They are not regarded as hangovers from pre-post-modernism which should be eliminated from the novel. Or whatever." The film rights for Coraline have been optioned to animation director Henry Selick, the man behind The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. But Gaiman is not getting his hopes up. Though a dozen of the writer's projects have gone into development over the last decade, not one has made it to the screen. "Of course, the thing you're really not supposed to say is that if you get the option renewed every year, it doesn't take long before you've made more money than you would ever have made if the film actually went into production." Gaiman is currently juggling a number of projects, the most unlikely sounding of which is a screenplay of Nicholson Baker's uneasy sexual fantasy The Fermata, to be directed - and this is the really unlikely bit - by Robert Forrest Gump Zemeckis. Sitting in his Gothic pile in Minneapolis, listening to Radio 4 on the Internet as he juggles calls from Mr Zemeckis and Terry Gilliam, Gaiman must occasionally consider the home life of the Hampshire accountant. How different things would have been if he'd listened to the man in the cellar.   Sunday, August 25, 2002 Feature - Sunday Tribune Posted by lucy_anne at 3:00 AM PDT | Comments (0) Anna Carey; "'Bestselling author no one's heard of '? Not for long"; Sunday Tribune; August 25, 2002; p.3 WHEN Neil Gaiman was 15, his school was visited by career advisers who gave the students a batch of tests and then interviewed them to see what careers they were suited for. The counsellor wasn't prepared for the young Gaiman's answer: "I said, 'Well, really, I'd like to write American comics.' And he looked at me as if I'd just waved a fish at him or something, then he said, 'Oh, how do you go about doing that then?' And I said, 'Well, I don't know, you're the careers advisor, I thought you could advise me.' And there was one of those long pauses that goes on longer than is comfortable and eventually he said, 'Tell me, have you ever thought about accountancy?'" Luckily, he hadn't. A couple of decades later and Gaiman is the man credited with making comic books intellectually respectable. He made his name as the creator of Sandman , the brilliant long-running series which was famously described by none other than Norman Mailer as "a comic strip for intellectuals". Like his old friend and early mentor Alan Moore, Gaiman showed that comic books could be, simply, great literature. He is now, in his own words, "the bestselling writer who no one has ever heard of." He doesn't just do comics, though. In fact, he hasn't done any comics for a few years (although he has some comic projects in the works, including a book called Endless Nights which will be out next spring and which will feature a story about each of the Endless from Sandman). Instead he's been writing novels - his last, the excellent American Gods was a deserved hit - and now he's written a book for children which may be his biggest success yet. Coraline is one of the best new children's books to appear in a long time. It puts Gaiman up there with Susan Cooper, Margaret Mahy and Diana Wynne Jones as writers of brilliantly disturbing children's literature. It's deliciously creepy in all the right places, but it's not too scary, even for the most over-sensitive child. Like the best children's fantasy novels, it is about a realistic little girl from our own world who embarks on an adventure in a house that's almost the same as her own. Gaiman started writing Coraline 10 years ago but was told by his editor that it was "unpublishable. He said, 'First, it's a scary book, and you can't do that for kids. And second it's a book that's obviously aimed at children and at adults and you can't publish a book like that.' So I put it away for a few years and then in 1998 I realised that if I didn't finish it soon, my youngest daughter would be too old for it, so I got it out again." He seems amused by the recent elevation of children's literature to "proper fiction". "I'm one of those people who's been reading kids' books all along. When people have asked me what I think of JK Rowling, I say that she's a fine, solid children's book writer, but when they're shocked and say, 'But she's changing the rules!' - I have to say that's she's not. She writes good, solid children's books, but just read Diana Wynne Jones! She's a national treasure, she's original." Gaiman didn't make a conscious decision to take a break from the medium in which he made his name. "By the time I finsihed Sandman , I'd been writing comcs for eight or nine years. I'd won every award you could win for writing comics, and a few you couldn't win for writing comics but which I'd won anyway. And I was exhausted. I'd spent the last few years saying 'no' to anything that wasn't Sandman , and I wanted to do new things. But I couldn't write a novel then. For one, I knew that I wasn't as good at writing prose as I was at writing comics; I had a lot to learn." Gaiman did Neverwhere , a fantasy series for the BBC, and then wrote the accompanying novel before embarking on Stardust (both a graphic novel and prose novel) and, finally, American Gods . "People liked it so much that I thought, 'Well, I must know what I'm doing in prose now', so it seemed like a nice time to go and do some comics again." The results, the aforementioned Endless Nights, will be published next February. That careers advisor left Gaiman with the impression that there was no way he could be a comics writer, and he eventually became a journalist, writing for mainstream British papers and magazines. "I still loved comics and wrote about them at every opportunity, which was almost impossible. I'd tell my editors about the huge advances being made in comics, about what Frank Miller and Alan Moore and Art Spiegelman were doing, and they'd say, 'Well, Neil, we just did a piece on Desperate Dan's 50th birthday last year. I don't think the public is ready for another comics piece!' And I'd be there going, 'It's not the fucking same . . .'" Eventually he decided to do it himself and eventually asked the great Alan Moore, to show him how to write a comic script. "It was the single most important thing anyone could have done." The rest is multi award-winning, hugely influential, history. These days, Gaiman's audience is expanding. "The first few events I did with Coraline, the audience were all adults. But so far there have been a few more kids at every signing. I think what's happened is that all the adults went out and bought the book and they'd buy a couple of copies and then give a few to kids they knew and liked. Then the kids would start showing them to their friends and it goes on from there." That night he gives a reading in Dublin, doing a couple of chapters from Coraline and answering questions from an audience too big for the confines of Hanna's bookshop. The audience is mostly over 20, but there are quite a few under-12s who hang on his every word, and the book is already Bloomsbury's biggest-selling hardback of the year. He may not be "the bestselling author that no one has ever heard of" for much longer."   Saturday, August 24, 2002 Coraline Clippings Posted by lucy_anne at 5:39 AM PDT | Comments (0) William Hartson; "Don't go without a book"; Express on Sunday; 28 July 2002; P.72. ...IT SAVES space in your luggage if you pick books the whole family will read. You will, of course, be taking the latest Lemony Snicket volumes and, as soon as it comes out next week, the unauthorised autobiography of Lemony Snicket himself. Read it when the kids are asleep. Another book the family will fight over is Neil Gaiman's CORALINE (Bloomsbury, £9.99). With elements similar to both Harry Potter and Philip Pullman's Dark Materials, it's a magical concoction in the best tradition of recent children's books... ### Megan Schliesman; "Authors Bring Breath of Fresh Air for Children and Teens"; 6 August 2002;Wisconsin State Journal;p.B1. ...Some teens will be familiar with Gaiman's work as creator of the "Sandman" graphic novels. He also writes fantasy novels, and one of them, "Stardust," was named an Alex Award Winner by the American Library Association in 1999 as one of the top 10 adult novels that also would appeal to teens. But Coraline is Gaiman's first novel written specifically for older children and young teens, and it's deliciously scary, perfect for those who like spine-tingling reading. The novel is about Coraline, who finds a mysterious passageway in her new home that leads to another flat strikingly like her own, right down to the furniture in the rooms and the pictures on the walls. There is also a mother and father there, and they look and sound a lot like Coraline's own parents, with the exception of their pale skin and button eyes. And unlike her real parents, Coraline's "other" mother and father, as they call themselves, seem eager to spend time with her. Too eager. When they show Coraline the pair of black buttons they've been saving just for her, she swiftly retreats to the safety of her real home, only to find her parents are missing. They've been taken prisoner by her "other" mother to lure Coraline back to that frightening place. And Coraline goes, uncertain of her bravery but sure in her determination to get her real parents back. Gaiman's eery, edgy story features a world that is an empty, chilling mockery of Coraline's real life, and one frightening turn of events after the other. But that world - and the story - is warmed and tempered by the courage and heart of its hero. Illustrator David McKean has worked with Gaiman on some of the Sandman titles and other ventures. In "Coraline," his occasional black-and-white illustrations enhance the story's gothic feel, while his cover image will help attract readers who like to be scared while deterring those who don't... ### H.J. Kirchhoff; "Book Review: AUDIO"; Globe and Mail 27 July 2002; p.D14. ...Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, read by the author, HarperCollins Canada, 3 hours, $26.95 Coraline is about a nine-year-old girl, the Coraline of the title, whose life with her work-at-home parents and eccentric neighbours is vaguely unsatisfying. On the other side of a supposedly blocked-up door, she discovers an alternative world, where her Other Mother and Other Father preside over a spooky mirror-image of her own home. With the help of a nameless cat, she resists the temptation to move permanently to her Other Home, and also rescues several lost children's souls. The British-born, U.S.-based Gaiman reads beautifully, with every voice -- including that of a gang of poetic rats -- note perfect. ### "The Staff or Bookmark, Spalding, Recommends their Summer Reading" Lincolnshire Echo; 15 July 2002. Reviewer: Tom Cassidy Neil Gaiman's debut children's book is excellent. Coraline, a curious young girl, moves to a new flat, only to find there is another flat, just like her own, but everything seems a little better with nicer food and the cat talks to her. With the other flat, however, comes her other parents, who are possessive and reluctant to let her leave. Her attempted escape leads Coraline to a chilling series of even more bizarre encounters. Coraline has the imaginative feel of Alice in Wonderland, mixed with Roald Dahl's most gruesome thoughts. A masterpiece... ### "Previews: August";The Bookseller; 17 May 2002; p.38. Barbara Pendrigh, Hammicks, Cheltenham Imagine opening a door in your living room, walking down a corridor, arriving at your replica home and being greeted by your "other mother", with shiny black buttons for eyes and very long white fingers. Imagine that she is really determined that you will stay with her...forever. This is scary stuff indeed. Coraline (Bloomsbury, 5th, hbk [pounds sterling]9.99, 0747558531) by Neil Gaiman is an intelligent, original novel that delights in exploring an uncanny world of ever-changing rules, small rooms, whispering children's souls and unhelpful, singing, acrobatic rats. Our young heroine, Coraline, considers that "the world has never been so interesting". I found the book quite frightening, but I am sure that it will find a wide audience of children who, like me, will love its eccentricity and the author's considerable storytelling skills...   Sunday, August 11, 2002 Clippings Posted by lucy_anne at 4:36 PM PDT | Comments (0) From today's Children's Books in Brief section in the New York Times: CORALINE. By Neil Gaiman. Illustrated by Dave McKean. HarperCollins. $15.99. (Ages 8 and up) A modern ghost story with all the creepy trimmings: Coraline and her parents have moved into a new house with one locked door. Behind that door is a parallel universe of sorts with another mother and another father, who would love to have Coraline stay with them forever. Well done. Coraline remains the 6th best selling book on the Times' Children's Books list for a second week. ### From the August 6th Minneapolis Star Tribune: The 1992 graphic novel "Signal to Noise," written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Dave McKean, is given loving and faithful treatment in this adaptation by writer-director William Stiteler. A film director, played by Aaron Kesher, is found to have a terminal illness and races to finish writing his next project, an apocalyptic story set on the cusp of the years 999 and 1000. Kesher started out stiff but found his feet after a few minutes, opened a vein at the midway point and generated palpable rage and anxiety that sustained until the end. The writing is excellent, but supporting roles were stiff. This play rates a run beyond the Fringe. (7 p.m. Wed.-Thu., 4 p.m. Fri., 7 p.m. Sun.; Acadia) -- Eric Hanson For what it's worth, "We Can Get Them For You Wholesale" was performed as part of a series of short plays called "One God, Two Salesmen & Three Humans" by the Opiate Theatre Group in Canberra back in June; the only thing unscathing comment in the entire review was that "...Wholesale" had a "clever script". ### From Teen People: BOOKS: Coraline By Neil Gaiman Part adventure, part horror story, this spooky reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, about a girl who accidentally enters a twisted mirror-world run by her wicked other mother, is worth a look. Cite: Jen L. Smith; "Picks"; Teen People; August 2002; p.114.   Sunday, August 4, 2002 Coraline Review - Atlanta Journal and Constitution Posted by lucy_anne at 3:00 AM PDT | Comments (0) Julia Bookman; "Kids' Corner: Pick of the Week"; Atlanta Journal & Constitution; Aug 04, 2002; p.H2. Curiosity may have killed a cat or two, but for little Coraline it opens the door, literally, into a freaky otherworld of ghoulish blobs and creatures, evil singing rats, a helpful talking black cat and a distorted couple with black-button eyes who claim to be the girl's "other" parents and are hungry to keep her with them forever. Adult novelist Neil Gaiman ("American Gods") wrote "Coraline," a truly original horror story, for his young daughter a decade ago. Children prone to the heebie-jeebies ought to stay away, but those who can take being scared out of their socks will want to read "Coraline" over and over again. At the onset of the story, Coraline's family has moved into an apartment in an old house. A door in the drawing room appears to open to a brick wall, but one night Coraline unlocks it and enters a world that supernaturally mimics her own. In this bizarre "night-black underground darkness," Coraline must save her real parents and also three other children, all of whom have been trapped by the "other" mother. Gaiman's storytelling is brisk and filled with vivid descriptions: "The other mother's wet-looking black hair drifted around her head, like the tentacles of a creature in the deep ocean."   Friday, August 2, 2002 CBLDF on Wired Posted by puck at 2:15 PM PDT | Comments (0) There's a good article about the CBLDF at the San Diego Comic-Con on Wired News. Powered by Coranto   Looking for books by Neil Gaiman?