Our old acquaintance Dr. Sandifier, whom you may recall from our John C. Wright vs Iain M. Banks debate has penned an astonishingly deep dive on the works of Neil Gaiman. Pace yourself and brace yourself, it’s longer than you would ever imagine, and enter at your own risk.
Indeed, the idea of predation lurks throughout The Doll’s House. In the first half Rose’s brother Jed is kept a prisoner by his abusive foster parents, who are in turn being influenced by one of the escaped dreams, the duo Brute and Glob, who are using his dreams for their own schemes. The second escaped dream, meanwhile, is the Corinthian, who’s become a serial killer and is at the convention. It’s also an obvious component of the prelude about Dream and Nada. This isn’t quite enough to be called a theme, especially as it’s not especially present in the arc’s denouement, but it’s still clearly, and frankly understandably, on Gaiman’s mind. Certainly it’s a more substantial unifying element than hearts or whatever.
Perhaps the most interesting instance of predation in the arc comes in a two page sequence in the Cereal Convention issue where Rose is told the “original version” of Little Red Riding Hood, in which the wolf has Red Riding Hood undress, telling her as she takes off each garment to “throw it on the fire; you won’t need it any more”—a beat that foreshadows her assault by Fun Land. Gaiman clearly means to position this story as a kind of ur-myth underlying all the subsequent serial killers. But it’s notable that in 2004 he wrote a blog post about his own identification with the wolf, arguing that he “represents an awful lot of stuff—the danger and truth of stories, for a start, and the way they change; he symbolises—not predation, for some reason—but transformation: the meeting in the wild wood that changes everything forever,” and notes that “when I was a boy, when I grew up I wanted to be a wolf,” before concluding that “The wolf defines Red Riding Hood. He makes the story happen. Without him, she’d just be another girl on her way to her grandmother’s house. And she’d leave her goodies behind, and come home, and no-one would ever have heard of her. But he’s not just her wolf: he’s all the wolves on the edge of the world, all the wolves in all the stories, all the wolves in all the dreams of wolves; flashing green eyes in the darkness, dangerously honest about what he wants: food, company, an appetite.” Even leaving aside his dubious assertion that the wolf is not a symbol of predation—certainly that’s how he uses it in The Doll’s House—this is striking in its apologism, particularly in its frankly alarming claim that the wolf is in some sense doing Red Riding Hood a favor by making her into a story.
All of this hangs uncomfortably over the first issue of Dream Country, a set of four stand-alone stories between The Doll’s House and the next arc. Called “Calliope,” the issue focuses on a writer, Richard Madoc, who, stuck and flailing on his second novel, makes a deal with Erasmus Fry, an aging writer, to acquire the muse Calliope, who Fry captured in the 1920s and had been using to fuel his own career. Madoc uses Calliope to catapult himself to an immensely successful career across numerous media and genres, ignoring her tearful pleas to be set free. Eventually Calliope contacts Morpheus, her ex-lover (as with Nada and, it will eventually emerge, literally every single romantic relationship over the course of Morpheus’s billions of years of existence, it ended badly), who frees her by cursing Madoc with an uncontrollable flood of ideas that drives him mad.
In 1990, this looked an effective horror story—enough so that DC included the script for it in the Dream Country trade paperback. With hindsight, however, what proves most unsettling about it is the degree to which the story prefigures so much of Gaiman’s own story. It’s not just the basic dynamic of a writer and a young, beautiful woman he treats as his muse while simultaneously abusing—a phenomenon that is hardly unique to Gaiman. It’s the specific details, from the way Madoc flits among genres and mediums to the way he insists that “I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer” to the detail of Erasmus Fry insisting that the captured Calliope call him “master.” Gaiman even sent artist Kelley Jones photos of his office to use as reference for Madoc’s.
What’s crucial to note is that this is not Gaiman telling on himself. It’s not just that Gaiman was still a decade away from the sort of outright abuse being allegorized in “Calliope”; the story is plainly aware of the horror of its subject… No, “Calliope” is far more disturbing than the comic book equivalent of that monologue from the serial killer who started following women around with a knife in his pocket before escalating. It’s a warning of what’s to come, yes, but the warning is not a comment on the author’s private fantasies; it’s a comment on the degree to which he fundamentally failed to understand the magic he was taking hold of, and what its consequences might be. He understood the broad strokes—that if he could survive the tightrope grind of monthly comics for long enough and create a work of sufficient quality and impact he could change his life decisively enough to get him fully out from the towering shadow of his upbringing. He understood that writing this story, about the King of Dreams and his tragedy, would allow him to also rewrite his story—to become Neil Gaiman instead of David Gaiman’s son. But he did not understand what that meant.
Sandifier is an excellent literary historian, but the one thing I find genuinely surprising about this section of what is intended to be a larger book about Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, is the way in which Sandifier clearly recognizes Gaiman’s penchant for ripping off literally anything and everything he can get his hands on, and yet seemingly fails to grasp that Gaiman is, at heart, nothing more than a glib and talented charlatan. He rightly condemns Gaiman for his sins, but not for his fraud.
I also find it a little curious that everyone still just accepts the idea that Gaiman is a legitimate bestselling author despite his close and obvious connections to another “bestselling” science fiction author whose massive sales over the years were, to put it mildly, orchestrated. He may be, but I suspect an in-depth investigation might reveal some level of similar orchestration.
Ironically, The Cuddled Little Vice is one of the few Hugo-nominated works that would have been worthy of the award back in the days when the Hugo actually meant something.
