Another Gaiman fan realizes that his literary hero was never all that good in the first place.
Gaiman’s approach to fantasy is a bit shallow. What I’m trying to say here is that Gaiman has a talent for creating mood pieces, but beyond that, his work falls apart.
For example, his stories often unfold as tableaux of strange and evocative moments: a forgotten god hitchhiking through America, a girl wandering into a mirror-world, a dream king brooding over his endless domain. These scenes are drenched in mythic suggestion, as if each image wants to convey some timeless meaning. But if you step through it, you often find he idea of profundity rather than the thing itself. His imagination operates like a collage: history, folklore, and pop culture are cut and pasted together to form something instantly atmospheric, yet curiously weightless. You can clearly see this in many of this Sandman tales: they have a strong opening/hook, but the ending is like “wasn’t that totally random fantastic happenstance neat?” And that’s pretty much it.
Part of the issue is that Gaiman’s relationship to myth feels archival rather than interpretive. He borrows freely from Norse sagas, biblical apocrypha, and fairy tales, but mostly to signal that we are in the presence of something “meaningful.” Rarely does he twist those sources into new psychological or philosophical insight. For example, this can be clearly seen in Season of Mists: The gathering of gods from different cultures is amusing and humorous, but if you look back upon it, the only real depth the whole storyline had was allusiveness. The gods were nothing beyond amusing or humorous curiosities. He’s a curator of myths, not a renovator of them. His most powerful tool is the reader’s own cultural memory; he relies on our preexisting reverence for myth to supply the emotional depth his narratives often lack.
If you strip away the mythic coating and what remains is often a rather simple moral fable or an exercise in mood: a cliched story about the endurance of stories, or the melancholy of immortality, or the faint shimmer of magic behind the mundane. It’s not that these are unworthy themes, but that they are presented through affection rather than argument. It’s basically “style over substance”. The result is fiction that feels “trippy” and profound in the moment, but evaporates upon reflection, leaving behind little more than a pleasant aftertaste of mystery.
Of course, he has certain gifts as a writer. He has a very good ear for rhythm (his prose is a goldmine for making pleasant audiobooks), a flair for genuinely striking imagery, and a knack for making the strange feel intimate. But too often, his fantasy reads like a spell cast for its own beauty, a shimmer of enchantment that delights the senses while concealing the absence of real substance beneath. His worlds are wondrous, yes, but their wonder tends to circle back on itself, never quite touching the ground of genuine insight.
He’s absolutely right. Neil Gaiman isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a bad or untalented writer. But he’s barely a good writer and he isn’t anywhere close to the great one that his fans, his publishers, and his press once would have had everyone believe. He’s always been a 7/10 in my book, and I’d drop that a point to 6/10 in light of his shameless ripoffs of other, much better writers, by far the most egregious and disgusting being the short story “Snow, Glass, Apples” which doesn’t even attempt to hide its overt imitation of Tanith Lee’s much better “Red as Blood”.
Ironically, although “Snow, Glass, Apples” is supposedly significant enough to have its own Wikipedia page, that page rather gives away the game with its “See Also” reference to the page about Tanith Lee’s short story collection, of which “Red as Blood” is the titular story.
But as manufactured creatures go, at least Gaiman did possess an amount of talent which he utilized to reasonable effect before he devoted himself to playing the public part of an Important Author and what is alleged to be his tubcuddling hobby.
The amusing thing is the way in which the fans pretend that Gaiman being off wasn’t always obvious to the sufficiently observant.
It’s annoying how some act like they’re these know it all sages, like they were always a few steps ahead of everyone else. Saying they always knew he was a sicko in real life based on the topics he wrote about. If they really knew, why didn’t they say something sooner, instead of showing up after the damage is done?
They did. But they were shouted down by fans who refused to either listen or see the obvious for themselves.
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