Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Genre; Urban Fantasy
Under the streets of London there’s a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.
Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: Neverwhere.
My thoughts:
This has been on my To Be Read pile for a long time and was one of my top five anticipated reads of 2016, which you can find listed Here. I love Gaiman. I think he is a master storyteller.
Neverwhere didn’t disappoint. It wasn’t entirely as I expected. I think I was expecting it to drop straight into the strange, but it didn’t. It firmly based itself in the real world before falling down the rabbit hole that was Neverwhere. This lent it a more believable feel. Richard was a normal, average, everyday working male and it was only circumstance that had led him into the situation he found himself in.
I really liked Richard and I liked his reactions to what was happening, to him and around him. Yes, it was the bizarre, but because of the initial setting of reality, it didn’t seem completely beyond the realm of possibility in some strange way as he took it in his stride. I loved the descriptions and quirkiness of it all. And I loved Richard’s humour around it.
It’s a brilliant use of having an everyday setting for a fantastical story. And the fantastical characters were just a delight. So well drawn, you could absolutely imagine them. Though there were two particular characters you really wish you didn’t have to imagine them as they were quite odious.
A fabulous read and I can see why people have always raved about Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. I now join those ranks.
Rebecca Bradley 