GaimanGate: The Authorial Edition
One of the worst movies I ever saw when I was a kid was a slimy, worm-ridden English horror film called Witchfinder General. I absolutely hated everything about it, it made me feel hollow and cold inside. It also made me angry for reasons I was too young to understand. I’d seen it at night and was left feeling oily the next day. Witchfinder General is the kind of movie that Gamma Males seem to be attracted to because it lets them feel like they are smarter than everyone else. They and they alone could truly appreciate what made it great.
Writer-Director Michael Reeves had originally planned for the film’s namesake to be a gamma male played by Donald Pleasance. It’s a movie that goes out of its way to subvert audience expectations every step of the way. The valiant young officer was handily defeated at every turn by the villain. His pure and beautiful love, defiled herself trying to save her father and then was tortured as a whore for it. Even when Mathew Hopkins is killed, the handsome young captain is left sobbing lost in impotent fury and hatred, while his love simply screams and screams because her life is shattered.
Witchfinder General’s story is one of the triumph of evil over good and Gamma Male artistic snobs insist that it’s brilliant.
Neil Gaiman insisted on putting Mathew Hopkins in Good Omens. And Terry Pratchett blew him to shreds courtesy of a witch that had had the foresight to pack gunpowder and nails into her petticoats before she went to the fire. You have no idea how good that scene made me feel.
This post started life as a book review of Good Omens. The only book with Neil Gaiman’s name on it that I have read cover to cover more than once. I thought it was going to be very hard for me to do because knowing what I know about Gaiman now I wouldn’t love the book anymore. However, reading through Good Omens with my writer’s cap on I quickly realized that seventy percent of Good Omens is pure Terry Pratchett. The rest started life as Gaiman’s work but Pratchett did so much punch up on it, that it’s more “nice and accurate” to say it was based on some ideas by Neil Gaiman. If you don’t believe me try and wade through the second season of Good Omens on Amazon.
Gaiman was raised a Scientologist, his first wife was a Scientologist. He was part of that world for a long time. People who get away from it are (with a few blessed exceptions) drawn toward atheism. Converts to Scientology that escape from it have an identity they can return to. If Neil ever left it at all, then he moved to a life in a vacuum. He started life in an all-controlling cult that believed all religions were invented by alien overlords to keep us busy. Where can a hollow man go from there?
He claims his biggest influence was Roger Zelzney, which to me is startling because Zelzney’s work is about as anti-Gaiman as you can get. While Zelazney is the father of modern fantasy his protagonists were all men of action. They move their stories forward.
Neil Gaiman’s protagonists are mostly along for the ride in their own stories. I can’t think of a single story of his where the protagonist had a balls-to-the-wall fight with his antagonist. He never wrote stories like that.
So what did he write?
During the 80s he worked as a “journalist.” When Pratchett was a journalist he covered the crime beat and hung out with cops. Gaiman covered the literary world, he mostly interviewed writers and did book reviews. His review of Battlefield Earth strongly indicates he was still a Scientologist at the time.
His first professional sale was a short story called Featherquest that Gaiman admits he’s buried because it’s bad. Fair enough. He claims that in 1984 he read a copy of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and magical magic happened to him and he wanted to write comic books.
If a Gamma Male’s story sounds like utter bullshit then it is.
He was always interested in comic books and was visiting London’s Forbidden Planet even without his Swamp Thing road to Damascus moment. The British indie comics scene was its own thing but was influenced in some degree by the booming American Indie comics of the 1980s.
It is a verifiable fact that he became friends with Alan Moore. What I can’t verify is how he got hold of Miracleman, maybe it was his literary connections, maybe his Scientology contacts but Miracleman was his first regular series. For those that don’t know, Miracleman was another incarnation of the original Captain Marvel, he just sort of took on a life of his own after a while. Miracleman ended at the same time that its publisher Eclipse folded.
Gaiman produced some fairly horrible indies like Mister Punch along with his illustrator Dave Mckean as indie graphic novels. In 1987, DC decided it was time to push the indies out of the indie comics and take it over themselves. One of the writers they signed was Gaiman and they put him to work on Black Orchid. Basically, he turned her into Swamp Thing/
In 1989 he began Sandman, the series that made him as big as he is. While Gaiman has always been generous with his praise of Dave McKean, he never goes quite so far as to admit that Sandman would have been an unremembered eighties oddity without Mckean’s artwork. The fact is, it was Mckean’s surrealist cover art that made the comic shopgoers curious enough to pluck a DC title off the rack that had been moribund for decades.
Gaiman’s native ability to construct prose is his strongest asset. It is his core talent. Once people who had bought Sandman and leafed through it long enough to realize it had nothing to do with Wesley Dodds but wanted to find out where the story was going anyway, found his prose compelling. Even if his story structure was not. The first Sandman serial Preludes and Nocturnes was mostly a series of mystery boxes and climaxed with a near-literal deus ex machina ending. Morpheus was turned back into a god and the Corinthian was waved away into dream dust.
Sandman also introduced exceptionally ugly sexual desires. The closest thing to clean you’d have in his stories would be love between homosexuals. But if a normal family was introduced you knew something hideous would happen to them or was already going on beneath the surface.
Gaiman strove to subvert audience expectations wherever possible with his stories. This almost always means that the artist is working for the approval of critics rather than to entertain his audience.
His endings are almost always unsatisfying. In Murder Mysteries a man who had raped and murdered his ex-girlfriend and her son only has his memory erased and is sent home to London.
In Neverwhere, the protagonist, Richard, is a simpy passenger in Door’s story. Door was the heroine of the story all along, she was the one that banished the Fallen Angel Islington and likely would have done it sooner or later anyway. Richard arguably got a few people killed who wouldn’t have died otherwise.
Richard was awkward, gangly, and had a mass of unruly black hair. So did Newton Pulsifer, so did Timothy Hunter, so did Fat Charley Nancy, and Tristran Thorn, and Richard, and the protagonist of Violent Cases, and of course, Morpheus, the king of dreams… But only of other people’s dreams.
An authorial self-insert is fine at first, but he’s been doing this for forty freaking years now.
There was a time when I thought he was a great writer because other people thought he was great. I also thought his comics would be worth something someday. I was wrong about that too.
Anansi Boys was the last Neil Gaiman book I read. It had a story I almost liked and an ending I almost remember which means it probably had one.
However, in 2008, a TV show on the sci-fi channel sparked my interest in a series of books called The Dresden Files. That seems to be about the time I lost all interest in Neil Gaiman’s work. I never was even tempted to crack another one of his stories. I can’t say a good story made me realize that a bad story that was getting all kinds of critical praise but otherwise was indeed just trash. But I did know I didn’t want to ever read something that made me feel like I had just finished watching Witchfinder General again.
*My Dad noticed and asked what was wrong. I told him and rather than punish me for watching a movie I wasn’t supposed to (which I wasn’t), he handed me a book with a huge black-haired bodybuilder on the cover with a bloodied sword in his hand. “Read this.” Conan the Barbarian rescued me.
