Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

"Richard Mayhew is an ordinary young man with an ordinary life and a good heart. His world is changed forever when he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. This small kindness propels him into a dark world he never dreamed existed. He must learn to survive in London Below, in a world of perpetual shadows and darkness, filled with monsters and saints, murderers and angels. He must survive if he is ever to return to the London that he knew."

This is an entertaining novel. It's your basic Gaiman - fascinating world with fantastic imagery, creepy villains, fast-paced plotting and a fair amount of chuckles. It's worth reading if you like dark-ish alternate reality fantasy.

I've been wanting to re-read this for years and the time finally felt right this October. I hesitate to say that Gaiman ‘builds' a compelling world for that phrase seems to imply some of the scaffolding is visible. It's not. The world Gaiman describes exists so wholly and so well painted that you never once think of it as something constructed but just, a place that is. It's a treat to be allowed a glimpse into it all. The story itself is actually a lot simpler than I remember, allowing the reader to drink in the world and characters and bob along with the story without having to concentrate too hard. Which is fine, but compared with the richness of the world, the plot itself does feel a little secondary. 5/5 for world, 5/5 for language, 4/5 for characters and 4/5 for plot, that's all I'm saying. Still an absolutely wonderful book. Oh, and Richard is a boring character, I feel the book would have been better without him and just wholly about London Below. I get that he has a function as muse and narrator and reflector of audience's perspective, but bleh he's just really naff.