UNTIL LAST YEAR, Neil Gaiman may have been the most famous writer you've never heard of, but with the filming of Stardust and Beowulf, and the dramatisation of The Wolves in the Walls by the National Theatre of Scotland, all that has changed. The equivalent to a rock god ever since his cult Sandman books were published 20 years ago, Gaiman is now one of the biggest things to hit children's publishing since J.K. Rowling - also, as it happens, published by Bloomsbury.

I'm in Covent Garden to interview him about The Graveyard Book, an interlinked collection of tales about Nobody, a baby boy who escapes from the serial killer who murders his entire family, and is brought up in a graveyard by ghosts, vampires and werewolves. Like his bestselling children's novel Coraline (also being filmed for release next year), it takes you into some scary places but, as he points out, what adults read as the most uncomfortable thing they can imagine, children take as a huge and thrilling adventure.

“Adults know I can take them by the hand into a dark place and run away, whereas children trust me, and I want to repay that trust,” he says. Not for nothing is one of his best fantasies, Anansi Boys, about a young man who discovers that he's the son of the African god of mischief; one of the joys of reading Gaiman is how he subverts our expectations of magic, horror, fantasy and the mundane.

An immensely likeable man with messy dark hair and, at 48, an endearing love of leather jackets, he was born near Portsmouth in Hampshire, the son of the last independent vitamin manufacturer in Britain. A geeky child who embarrassed his younger sister by always having his nose in a book, he went straight into writing after school.

For two years he lived in Edgware and “did the starving writer thing, producing a bunch of short stories and a children's novel that everyone rejected before I realised that I hadn't written enough, lived enough”.

He then had a wonderful three years in the early 1980s, working as a freelance journalist for publications such as Time Out, “living off chicken wings at film screenings”, and interviewing everybody he wanted to meet, including Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett (both of whom later collaborated with him on books.) But in his mid-twenties his love of comics became too powerful to resist.

Graphic novels are now pretty mainstream and respectable - when I tell Gaiman that my teenage daughter wants to become a graphic novelist he exclaims at once, “Good - then she'll become very rich!”

However, it was unexplored terri-tory to all but adolescent males when he began the Sandman series; he still gets the owners of shops such as Forbidden Planet saying: “I got to thank you, man, for bringing women into my stores.” Part of the attraction was that “unlike the novel where you'd be on the same shelf as Apuleius and Austen, comics have been around for only 100 years and there are all these cool places nobody has taken it as an art form. It's harder than writing film scripts - it's like writing, directing and editing a film.”

Now published as ten books, Sandman's market still keeps growing, and 20 years on, what seemed like the most disposable medium has become enshrined in leather bindings and a huge international fan base. Almost all Gaiman's books are, in a way, about someone trying desperately to fit into a dull, safe place and finding himself, like the shop-boy in Stardust, happy only in a crazy, dangerous one.

His oeuvre spans the “extreme sex and weirdness” of American Gods (about a former convict travelling across the US with a former god) to the primal fear of the picture-book The Wolves in the Walls. He loathes the concept of the crossover book, but his richly imaginative, dark fantasies have the classic element of appealing to the adult in children and the child in adults. It is no coincidence that two of the classic children's authors he most admires are Rudyard Kipling and P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, both of whom had a profound influence on The Graveyard Book.

Gaiman had the idea for it 20 years ago, when newly married and living in a tall thin house without a garden. He'd take his toddler son across the road to ride his tricycle in the local graveyard, and the idea of a boy brought up by dead people was “one of those wonderful, clear, perfect moments”. He wrote a page and a half before realising that he needed to learn his craft if he wasn't to waste it; grappling with it every five years until finally realising in 2002 that he “wasn't going to get any better”. Though inspired by the atmosphere of an English graveyard, it also fits perfectly into the Gothic, post-Poe American sensibility, and is a memorable, captivating read.

Pleasingly, Gaiman himself now lives in “a huge, Addams family-style house in America, with acres of spooky woods,” after realising in 1991 that he could buy his dream house there for the price of a one-bedroom flat in London. He moved his wife and three children to Minneapolis and has never looked back, writing the much-garlanded American Gods and becoming one of Hollywood's favourite writers. His own family, baffled by his choice of career (though always supportive) realised that he had “finally got cool” only after attending the premieres of Stardust and Beowulf within weeks of each other last year.

The “mad artistic one” has, just like his heroes, come good.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Bloomsbury, £14.99 Buy the book

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