The Artistry of Neil Gaiman: Finding Light in the Shadows ed. by Joseph Michael Sommers and Kyle Eveleth (review)

As the editors of this volume point out, there have been "only a scant few book-length critical examinations" (xxi) of Gaiman's work, so this edited collection is a welcome addition. The editors have certainly tried to cover a range of Gaiman's output, with discussions extending far beyond his most celebrated works (arguably The Sandman and Coraline, both examined here) to a consideration of Gaiman's picturebooks (Blueberry Girl, The Wolves in the Walls and The Sleeper and the Spindle, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, Crazy Hair), his graphic novels (The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch and Violent Cases) and works that have crossed media divides, such MirrorMask and Never-where, let alone his essays (The View from the Cheap Seats has a chapter). Clearly, anyone trying to categorize the breadth of Gaiman's impressive output is on a hiding to nothing, for the man rides roughshod over established classifications, blending fiction and nonfiction (as does his Angels and Visitations collection) and moving effortlessly across media boundaries, let alone eliding that division between realism and fantasy and challenging those who like to keep children's and adults' books strictly separate.

This collection makes much of the interstitial space that Gaiman inhabits, with notions of liminality, hybridity, queering, and conceptual blending featuring extensively. One could argue that the format of the book itself mimics this approach, deliberately avoiding any conventional ordering, with the content organized into the following sections: "The Lighter Side of Neil Gaiman"; "'No Light, but Rather Darkness Visible': Illuminating Gaiman's Murkier Pages"; "Gaiman's Brumous Boundaries and the Liminal Space"; and "'The World Always Seems Brighter When You've Just Made Something that Wasn't There Before': Afterthoughts, Filters, and Interviews." This final category itself sounds a bit of an afterthought, mopping up what's left—except that it isn't final; for, following the "Afterthought," there are two interviews, somewhat tautologously headed "Interviews."

All told, this makes the book a bit of a curate's egg, unlike some more focused explorations of Gaiman's work (e.g., Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild! and Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman, both from 2012). But this said, it does make the volume more of a companion to Tara Prescott's collection of essays, Neil Gaiman in the 21st Century (2015), for Prescott's compilation concentrates on the very titles that this work is light on: American Gods, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and A Calendar of Tales. Apart from The Sandman and some of Gaiman's picturebooks, there is little overlap (though four of the authors from Prescott's volume, including Prescott herself, feature in this present collection). This critical demarcation of territory is, presumably, what lies behind the editors' claim that their anthology "tries to open up discussion on the many of his texts that have been left critically undiscovered." However, I'm not sure what they mean when they go on to say that such discovery involves "examining the long-running concept of Gaiman's voice and authorial tone" (xxi).

There are certainly some rewarding insights in these essays, often opening up interesting theoretical approaches, most of which, as noted earlier, deploy concepts that riff on notions of liminality. This said, there is some cherry picking, with the theoretical underpinning not always adequately grounded. Thus the chapter "Queering Space in Neil Gaiman's Illustrated Works" is really concerned with what Foucault termed "heterotopias," with the word "queer," as the authors themselves acknowledge, being "used… as a rather elastic term related to non-normativity in a myriad of ways," subverting "supposedly stable binary categories such as in/out, life/death, dream/awake" (206). In the process, the question of gender itself seems to have been relegated to the sidelines, only cropping up tangentially in a...