Quotes of the Day

An adult in one hand, a book to be signed in the other, the children troop into the theater to ask questions of a highly important nature. Their target is the writer Neil Gaiman, whose fantasy book for kids The Wolves in the Walls has just been made into a musical that opened in Glasgow last month and transferred to London's Lyric Theatre for two weeks before going on tour in Scotland next month and England this fall. Gaiman explains to his young fans that the book was inspired by a nightmarish fantasy his daughter Maddy once had. The children are rigorous cross-examiners. "But from where exactly in her bedroom did the wolves appear?" a skeptical 8-year-old girl wants to know. Gaiman answers with not a moment's hesitation: "A foot above her head and a little to the left."

As the famed creator of entire comic-book universes, Gaiman knows the importance of detail — and it is his ability to commute between them and the real world that has expanded his fan base far beyond the fantasy-fiction clichés of teen goths and pimply geeks. Whether through film adaptations of his best-selling fiction, graphic novels, children's books or screenplays, Gaiman is a hot commodity these days. Today he's in London for just 24 hours to check on the progress of Wolves and visit the set of Stardust, the film version of his 1997 romantic fairy fantasy, which director-producer Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) is shooting with an all-star cast that stretches from Sienna Miller to Ricky Gervais. Because Vaughn was deep in screen tests, he and Gaiman only got to wave to each other across the set before the author had to leave. "In any kind of sane universe," Gaiman says, "I would be hanging around on the set saying, 'This is mine, this is cool.'"

Instead, in the morning, the British-born Gaiman will climb on a plane — where he'll finish writing an article on Superman — for the Addams Family–style house near Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he has lived since 1992. There he will knuckle down to his screen adaptation of Charles Burns' teen-horror, graphic-novel series Black Hole. Then, Gaiman must deliver the first of six issues of The Eternals, a resurrected Marvel Comics creation from the '70s. Oh, and he also needs to finish a book of short stories, as well as The Graveyard Book, a tale of an orphan child being raised by dead people. In his spare time, he may swing by Los Angeles to see how Roger Zemeckis' animated version of Beowulf, for which Gaiman rewrote the oldest epic in the English language, is coming along.

Isn't that too much to juggle? Gaiman, jet-lagged but engaged, rocks one hand from side to side in answer. "I'm pushing it," he admits. "Right now is the first time I've ever looked around and thought, 'That's not sane.'" Indeed, Gaiman's name has become such a seal of approval that he's just realizing he won't be able to accept all the projects he's offered. It wasn't always that way. Although The Sandman, Gaiman's 1989-96 series of comic books about a family of flawed immortals, has sold more than 7 million copies, the mainstream media tended to be sniffy. Not that it bothered Gaiman: "Comics are a medium that gets mistaken for a genre, where I could do horror or detective stories, spy fiction or anything I wanted and nobody noticed that I was not staying in my box."

As imaginative fiction went big time in the late '90s, it became clear that Gaiman had long since left any box. His credentials as a bankable novelist grew with each title from Stardust (1998), through his epic of warring divinities American Gods (2001), to last October's Anansi Boys, which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times' adult best-seller list. In 1996, Gaiman, with longtime friend and illustrator Dave McKean, wrote The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, his first children's book. He had already begun work in 1992 on Coraline, a seriously spooky novella about a girl's journeys into a parallel world where her parents have buttons for eyes, ghosts of dead children need help freeing their souls, and rats sing. But after looking at one chapter, Gaiman's publisher deemed it unpublishable. "He told me there was no market for a book aimed at both children and adults, let alone a horror fantasy," Gaiman recalls. Coraline was finally published in 2002, after Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events had squashed that theory. A $70 million animated film version by Henry Selick (James and the Giant Peach) is set to hit cinemas in 2007.

Gaiman's first notable movie work was to rewrite the script of Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke for an American audience. That was widely applauded, though last year's MirrorMask, which he wrote and McKean animated, was a stylish but failed experiment that could take years to recoup even its measly $4 million investment. For his own novels, Gaiman is happy to leave the screen adaptation to someone else. "It's rather like having to barbecue your own baby," he says. "I'm sure the author of Beowulf would be appalled by what I've done." Nonetheless, for his first foray into theater, Gaiman did agree to rework Wolves in the Walls' 2,300 words himself, adding lyrics to what the National Theatre of Scotland is promoting as "a musical pandemonium" — a less daunting description than "a modern opera for families with young children." But it's still a daring debut for a flag-flying company that just launched itself without a theater or a permanent troupe to call its own. It's already in talks to bring Wolves to the U.S. next spring.

Staged with London's Improbable theater company and its director/designer Julian Crouch, whose junk opera Shockheaded Peter was a transatlantic smash last year, Wolves springs thrillingly to life onstage, lifting McKean's scribbled and cut-and-paste illustrations straight off the page and onto the set. The music by Nick Powell gives fun — occasionally funky — support and the whole production rests confidently on Gaiman's slim but compelling story: A little girl named Lucy, her jam-making mother, tuba-playing father and computer-obsessed brother all must face the consequences when Lucy's dreaded wolves pour out of the walls and take over the house. The fact that they turn out to be not creatures of the dark but rather hooligan wolves who break things and get jam and popcorn everywhere makes for plenty of slapstick fun. But it's also a poignant fable about dealing with fears of the unknown — a place about which children and their parents will always have questions and Gaiman is never at a loss for an answer.

• MICHAEL BRUNTON
• A scary musical for kids is just the latest fantasy frontier for British master storyteller Neil Gaiman