the where of Neverwhere.

During what was an acceptably charming BBC miniseries in 1996, author Neil Gaiman kept a notebook with him, wherein he decided that all the efforts happening on behalf of his commissioned screenplay deserved a matching novel, and so he wrote Neverwhere.

With the property also being adapted into a graphic novel & BBC radio drama, some half-born rumors that it's going to be movied for the big screen, and Gaiman's announcement in February last year of an in-progress sequel book, such narrative endurance again proves Gaiman is one of our foremost our modern mythographers.

Neverwhere taps into the persistent idea that there's another more fascinating reality below the conscious universe that reflects our unconscious in all its imagination and desire, beneath the skin and bone, the thought under the thought. It's the truth behind that nagging feeling of the apparent world versus the essential.

[Tucked to the side of a vagrant haunted Tucson underpass, this installation was enchanted by a sinister elder-styled script with the key "The Door Opens Inward". Photo credit to myself during a dog walk one very dark night.]

Preceeding Neverwhere in this city below concept is Arthur Machen's The London Adventure (citations from the 1924 Knopf hardback):

"... and that fancy is infinitely more impress than fact, partaking, as it does, not of actuality but reality." p.48 

"But I think something happened; that the doors were opened; that the human spirit came into momentary contact with worlds which it is not meant to visit." p.82-83 

"Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that; when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land." p.152

Like a master storyteller, it's Gaiman's oh-so-proper English style and completely in-passing delivery that gives the tale its voice. It comes off so easy & winning, which is a testament to the forethought and craft behind the work. The following citations from the pagination of the first U.S. edition hardback prove this:

"He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more useful), to comprehend the city". p.9 

"A click: the sound of a switchblade opening, empty and lonely and dark." p.19 

"She looked at him rather sadly, like a mother trying to explain to an infant that yes this flame was hot, too. All flames were hot. Trust her, please." p.75

"Then he flexed his fingers, put the pennywhistle to his lips, and began to play an odd, rollicking tune that leapt and twisted and sang. It made Richard feel as if he were thirteen years old again, listening to the Top Twenty on his best friend's transistor radio at school during lunch hour, back when pop music had mattered as it only can in your early teenage years: the marquis's reel was everything he had ever wanted to hear in a song ..." p.125 

"But now, in her dream, that is not happening. Instead, the weasel is reaching out a forepaw toward her, and she is dropping her throwing stick and taking its paw. And then and there, in the undercity beneath Bangkok, they are dancing together, in one intricate unending dance: and Hunter is watching from outside herself, and she is admiring the elaborate movements they make as they move, tail and legs and arms and fingers and eyes and hair all tumbling and twisting powerfully and strangely into the underneath and out across forever." p.192 

"'How old are you?' asked Door. Richard was pleased she had asked; he never would have dared. 'As old as my tongue,' said Hunter, primly, 'and a little older than my teeth.'" p.201

[The Chair of Mysteries sits at the end of a street. One feels as if someone might materialize there when the planes shift and the worlds touch. Found & photographed by myself during another fearless dog walk into a neighborhood no one should live in.]

Recently I had the pleasure of attending the Tucson Steampunk Society's book club meeting for this urban fantasy favourite, which only liminally has some shared subgenre points with steampunk. I hadn't expected it to be livecast & recorded, but I'm glad the TSS got to show off its literary taste & acumen, myself included.

Watch it here.

I enter off camera at 47:37, get asked about my social credentials & am begged to runway model walk my Dark Librarian apron for the Monster Rangers at 51:00, cite the book's most intense moment 1:00:49 with a clever roller-coaster metaphor, orate my perception of the use of mythic time and parallel ideas at 1:16:11, and questioned if would I go to London Below at 1:19:16, which is yes, obviously.


Looking forward to The Seven Sisters, wherein the tale of Neverwhere is continued. 

[TSS is doing Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age next month, so if you've got serious brilliances to say about this Nanopunk original, do come.]

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11/2018 Addenda: The above pictures have since changed. The Chair of Mysteries has left its nexus point and is missing, and the City of Tucson has misguidedly used our tax dollars to paint over "The Door Opens Inward" label but not the actual graffiti in that same underpass. 

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.