Random Thoughts On Books - Neil Gaiman

I read Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere sometime in the 1990s I think. Spoilers to follow if it matters for a book published nearly 30 years ago... It just occurred to me now how a tell of just how mundane and bourgeois Gaiman is was how he telegraphed the villainy of the "good" angel character by how he got the main characters, a twenty-ish man and a younger woman (who was also, I think, underage -- sixteen maybe? It's been a while) drunk. 

His Sandman comics were my main thing for a time. On the surface they were rather progressive (sexually ambiguous characters such as Desire, plenty of gay characters who weren't obvious stereotypes, etc.), but there was an overlying cisheterosexuality that promoted traditional domesticity as an ideal if not one that all the characters were suited for, and that was seen as a semi-tragedy or fatal flaw (Dream can't seem to have a relationship that doesn't end with something horrible happening to his lady friends, Barbie leaves Ken and goes off in a bus to an ambiguous future, that girl whose name I forget is made pregnant by some guy who drops her, etc.) And the one trans character is shown having doubts about surgery and ends up fridged. And awful things seem to happen to all the Black characters in one way or another.

Neverwhere also contains the idea of the "starter girlfriend/wife", which considering how Gaiman's own domestic situations have gone is quite... interesting. At the end of Neverwhere, and at the end of The Graveyard Book, we have both heroes deciding that the girl they've shared a life-changing adventure with is not, after all, the One they want to be with for the rest of their lives. Oddly enough, this occurs in both books (I haven't been able to get through any of his other books) after they've rescued the women from some danger. In Graveyard the girl even gets her memory wiped, nothing problematic about that! I suppose this strikes some people as a satisfactory way of dealing with the tired old "hero gets the girl" trope, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.