Author Neil Gaiman at his home in Cambridge, Mass.
Neil Gaiman Remembers being punished. "I could run down a list of my teachers for you when I was 9 or 10 by the physical punishments they liked inflicting on us," he says. He has a whimsical, wistful, mannered way of speaking that along with his light English accent serves up each sentence like an expertly bowled cricket ball. You immediately get why he's among the few authors who are allowed to do their own audiobooks. "From the spotty young man, Mr. Cook, who made us--and we were wearing short trousers--stand on a desk while hitting the backs of our knees with a ruler, to the ones who would grab you just there"--he pinches the hair right in front of his ear--"and turn it, to the really kind of perverted ones who would go down for your nipple and squeeze. And the ones who would simply throw things ... What the f--- was up with that? Did adults know? Did they care?"
Gaiman is a writer, so it's part of his job to remember things, even (or maybe especially) the unpleasant ones. He's good at it: over the course of a 30-year career, he's written a string of fantastical comic books and novels--including The Sandman, Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline and The Graveyard Book--each of which is a landmark in its genre. His work combines an enormous verbal intelligence with visceral images of sorrow and horror, tempered by his consolatory charm and humor, and it has made him a cult icon verging on just a plain old icon at this point. "I'm now more famous," he says, "than I'm comfortable being."
It doesn't hurt that unlike most writers, Gaiman actually looks like a writer. He's handsome in an interesting way, with a big nose and dark, wavy hair that's always slightly disheveled to the point where you start to wonder whether it was ever properly sheveled in the first place. Gaiman wears only black: the day we talk, he has on a black T-shirt, black slacks, black socks and black boots. Later when we go outside, it gets chilly, so he puts on a black coat.
Gaiman is prolific, but even by his standards he's having a big year. By the end of 2013 he will have published an anthology, two children's books and a book based on a graduation speech he gave last year called Make Good Art. He has written a dozen short stories--one for each month of the year--based on ideas readers submitted via Twitter as part of a promotion for BlackBerry. In March the BBC produced a radio play of Neverwhere starring, among others, James McAvoy and Benedict Cumberbatch (who may be the second most Gaiman-esque person on the planet). Gaiman wrote an episode of Doctor Who that aired in May. A new Sandman comic will come out this year, the first since 1996, and Gaiman is hard at work prepping a sequel to American Gods even as he develops the original into a series for HBO. Yesterday he finished a 10,000-word short story just because he felt like it.
And none of that is why we're sitting in his house in Cambridge, Mass., talking about corporal punishment. We're here because on June 18, Gaiman is publishing a novel called The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which he describes as "the most serious, dark, weird and personal thing I've ever written."