Neverwhere » (Unabridged)

Novelist Neil Gaiman has sent a British businessman tumbling into a fantastic underworld and had a devil and angel comically conspiring to thwart the Apocalypse. He found his biggest success, though, in Death, Dreams and Destruction -- and the four other similarly named siblings who controlled the reins of the human race's emotional impulses in his graphic-novel series The Sandman, a wholesale rejuvenation of graphic fiction that had everyone from Tori Amos to Norman Mailer spinning with, yes, Delirium.

Neil Gaiman, the genius behind "The Sandman" graphic novels -- which Norman Mailer called "a comic strip for intellectuals" -- delves into novel-length fiction with Neverwhere, a wild and mesmerizing story set in a bizarre and chilling underground London. Neverwhere begins innocently enough: It's the story of Richard Mayhew, a plain man with a good heart. Unhappy in love and in life, Richard is thrust into a dark and evil world when he stops to help a young girl he finds bleeding in the street. Now Richard has much more than work and girlfriend dilemmas on his mind -- now he's wanted by two very evil, powerful, and nasty mercenaries who like to think that they are, in fact, rather gentlemanly. Lyrical, humorous, and horrifying, Neverwhere is a fantastic novel

Tori Amos

I didn't ever want this book to end. . . Hunter, Islington, Door — these characters are part of my life now. I see them when I turn corners.