Sipping on a tall cup of chai, Gaiman spun animated and eloquent answers to our questions. The amalgam explores America’s spiritual center and centerless spiritualism through the timeless archetype of the mythical hero. In picaresque fashion, Gaiman interweaves the broader story of a brewing storm, an all-out war between gods, with shorter tales of different people who came to America as indentured servants, slaves, and prosperity seekers. Since bringing Sandman to a close, Gaiman has written several novels, a collection of short stories, and even, with frequent collaborator Dave McKean, a children's book ( The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish.) His new novel, American Gods, follows the story of Shadow, an ex-convict who becomes mired in the machinations of pagan deities brought to America by immigrants and then abandoned for the newer gods of technology, drugs, and money. Some of it came from the variety of kinds of stories Gaiman wrapped around the character-everything from horror stories to historical vignettes to wonder tales.

Some of this uniqueness came from the central character of Morpheus, neither hero nor anti-hero, who had the ring of archetype, but remained an original creation. Certainly, he wove in connections to older comics and even older stories and myths, but his Sandman went its own way. As opposed to the reimagining of older heroes that was the trend, Gaiman gave us a whole new imagining, inventing the saga of 'the dreaming' and its denizens as he told it. Gaiman's alchemy was amply evident in his influential Sandman series for DC Comics, which was remarkable not just because it was so well done, but because it was done so much on its own terms. But Gaiman's writing blends and balances things that aren't ordinarily combined: reality and fantasy, humor and horror, the fairy tale and the novel, the personal and the cosmic. He first made a name for himself in comics, a genre that isn't usually connected all that closely to reality.

Neil Gaiman's writing career began in journalism, that most reality-oriented of approaches to the word.

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