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Gaiman’s catalog is sprawling, covering everything from short stories and comics to children’s books and novels. Whatever the project, Gaiman brings exquisite detail, lovingly rendered settings, multifaceted and endearing characters, and lore that seems to have roots far deeper than the page. For all these reasons and more, Neil Gaiman will go down as one of the most imaginative and successful writers of the modern age. Here are some of the best Neil Gaiman books currently available.
Updated November 19, 2022 by Kath Leroy: With the recent release of the successful Netflix series The Sandman, people have been paying even more attention to Neil Gaiman’s rich body of work that details novels for adults, children, as well as graphic novels and collection of short stories mixed with the occasional poem.
Gaiman’s imagination ensures that every book he writes is a story worth reading, especially for all fans of the fantasy genre, not just for them but for everybody who enjoys high-quality literature. Besides Gaiman’s onscreen adaptations, all fans of shows such as The Sandman or American Gods should pay attention to his brilliant literary works.
11 Stardust
Of all Neil Gaiman’s work, Stardust is the closest to classic fantasy. However, Gaiman changes the genre’s rules to fit the story he wishes to tell, and he does so in a way that leaves the readers captivated, and drawn into his world full of magic, danger, and love.
Stardust serves as a coming-of-age story, with the main hero Tristran Thorne searching for a fallen star and realizing the world is much more complex than he had originally believed. The novel seems to have it all, from humorous moments to touching ones. It inspired the 2007 live-action adaptation directed by Matthew Vaughn in which Charlie Cox took on the leading role of Tristran (called Tristan in the movie), long before his portrayal of Daredevil in the MCU.
10 Norse Mythology
There is much more to Norse mythology than the MCU Thor movies would have audiences believe. Neil Gaiman’s passion for the topic is obvious from the book. Combined with his unique style of writing and the fast pace, Norse Mythology is the type of book the readers will finish fast because something captivating happens on every page.
The book provides enough detail to capture the attention of people familiar with the topic but at the same time, it serves as a good introduction to Norse myths of gods, heroes, tricksters, and other extraordinary beings that wouldn’t be out of place in Gaiman’s other books too.
9 Smoke And Mirrors
Other than being a prolific novelist and screenwriter, Neil Gaiman has also mastered the art of writing short stories. He published multiple short story collections but Smoke and Mirrors stand out even among them despite their overall high quality. It mixes multiple genres, creating a rich whole that will leave the readers admiring the many ideas Gaiman can come up with.
First published in 1998, Smoke and Mirrors contains themes and emotions that Gaiman returned to in his work over and over again, in different forms, from the fine line between reality and imagination to the pain of loss and heartbreak. As such, it’s an ideal book for new readers who can get a glimpse of Gaiman’s style and decide if they would like to read more of his work.
8 The Sleeper And The Spindle
Fairytale retellings are a popular fantasy genre, as they take the stories so many people know and love and offer an original spin on them. Neil Gaiman has done so multiple times, most notably with the short book The Sleeper and the Spindle which offers a variation of the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. It’s possible to finish the book fast considering its length.
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However, it’s not as suitable for children as other fairytale retellings since Gaiman doesn’t spare the characters. The story has its magical as well as scary moments and the illustrations by Chris Riddell help create its unique atmosphere, making it the perfect Neil Gaiman book for those who have no time to spare.
7 Neverwhere
Though less famous than some of Gaiman’s other novels, Neverwhere is no less enjoyable. It’s the story of Londoner Richard Mayhew, a young businessman whose normal life is disrupted when he stops to help a young girl whom he finds bleeding. The girl’s name is Door, and the Door is on the run from a pair of assassins, which is only the beginning of Richard’s problems. Unlike some stories with characters that are well-written but not likable, Gaiman’s are both in Neverwhere.
Something has gone wrong: those around him lose any sense of who he was, causing him to lose his job, his apartment, and soon his fiancée. Richard’s only choice to fix things is to enter the mysterious world of London Below and look for Door. From there Neverwhere becomes a modern fairytale of sorts, packed with imaginative characters and locations, putting Gaiman’s whimsy on display as much as his keen eye for detail.
6 The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish
Neil Gaiman’s first children’s book, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, has two incredible things going for it other than its title: the writing prowess of Gaiman and the illustrative beauty of Dave McKean. McKean would go on to collaborate with Gaiman on a variety of other projects, elevating every one of them with his unique style.
The story is Gaiman’s riff on a classic: an object gets swapped from person to person, but then the original owner needs it back and has no option but to undo all the swaps, one at a time, in order to retrieve it. Gaiman excels at taking inspiration and twisting it in unique ways, bending old stories until they all but break, and then walking them back from the edge. The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish is a children’s book, but it’s crafted with all the love and attention that Gaiman gives to his adult novels, and it has Dave McKean’s artwork to bring it to life.
5 The Graveyard Book
Nobody “Bod” Owens is raised in a graveyard after his parents are murdered. That’s the kind of thing that would already make for a good story, but Neil Gaiman wrote The Graveyard Book, so the story doesn’t stop there.
It’s the graveyard’s own ghosts that raise Bod, and he is granted the Freedom of the Graveyard, allowing him to pass through solid objects while he’s in the graveyard. Written as Gaiman’s own take on Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, The Graveyard Book takes the middle ground between Gaiman’s true children’s books and his modern adult titles. Though marketed towards younger readers, adults will find just as much to love about this wonderfully gothic world and its beautifully written characters.
4 American Gods
American Gods received a television adaptation in 2017, and though Starz did a good job at translating Gaiman’s vision to the silver screen, the novel is an excellent work in its own right. As American Gods show, one of the things that Neil Gaiman does best is establishing sprawling worlds with even more sprawling casts, often drawing upon mythology and fairytales for his inspiration.
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The hero of American Gods is Shadow, a convict who is released from prison three days early when his wife is killed in a car accident. From there, Shadow takes a job as a con man’s bodyguard, traveling with him across the U.S. and meeting a variety of eccentric characters, including Mad Sweeney the leprechaun. When the true nature of his employer is revealed, Shadow is sucked into the conflict that is brewing between the Old Gods and the New Gods who are manifestations of modern phenomena such as the internet.
3 Good Omens
Having a favorite author is nice. Having two favorite authors is amazing. Having two favorite authors collaborate on a book is many readers’ dream, and for some, that dream came true when Neil Gaiman collaborated with Terry Pratchett on Good Omens. Pratchett, best known for his satirical Discworld, had a fantasy writer’s sense for world-building but a humorist’s sense for comedy, and his collaboration with Gaiman could hardly have gone better. In fact, it’s easy to argue the book is one of their best stories.
Good Omens is a comedy story about the birth of Satan’s son and the end of the world. In it, the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley conspire to stop the apocalypse, because they’ve grown comfortable on Earth and don’t want something as inconvenient as the End Times to get between them and their coziness. Though it deals heavily with religious themes, the book never loses sight of the joke.
2 Coraline
Before it was a stop-motion movie, Coraline was a children’s story. Just because this novella is aimed at a younger audience doesn’t mean it’s free of creepy imagery or mature themes, however. The Other Mother with her button eyes and long, twitchy fingers is about as unsettling a character as one will find in a children’s book.
Coraline combines the best elements of Gaiman’s work: precise language, imaginative world-building, and characterizations that are somehow both funny and tragic. Most of all, it is a story that grows from the seed of an idea: a young girl goes through a mysterious door in her apartment and is transported to a world in which she has another family not quite like her own. Nightmarish illustrations help cement Coraline as one of Neil Gaiman’s greatest works.
1 The Sandman
Everything that Neil Gaiman does is eventually compared to The Sandman, his epic graphic novel series about The Endless. Dream and his six siblings (Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium) are personifications of eternal forces, each with complete authority over their respective realms. Few graphic novels have ever achieved anything approaching the scope, detail, and power of Gaiman’s epic series, with its incredible main story interwoven with many smaller ones.
Leaping back and forth through time and around the world in a globetrotting (and realm-trotting) adventure, The Sandman is esoteric, touching, funny, brutal, sweet, and a dozen other adjectives. Part mythology, part memoir of family dysfunction, The Sandman should tear apart under the weight of its own themes. That it doesn’t is a testament to Gaiman’s incredible writing.
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