Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

For once the cover blurb was right--the cover of this fantasy novel said it was "A dark contemporary Alice in Wonderland." That's a good description, except for the "dark" part.

Gaiman's hero, Richard Mayhew, does not fall down the rabbit hole, but through the cracks, so to speak, into the literal underworld of London. It all begins when he and his fiance stumble over a girl on the street, who is covered in blood. Taking her back to his apartment, over the protests of his fiance, Richard finds that he has inadvertently involved himself in the tangled affairs of an alternate London, the one existing in the sewers and abandoned subway tunnels beneath the city. And things get curiouser and curiouser.

Richard becomes involved in a Quest, to find the murderers of the rescued girl's family and to win back his normal life in the London Above. Along the way he meets rats who communicate with humans; the Velvet Lamia, a vampire-like seductress; the Angel Islington, who had once been the overseer of lost Atlantis; the amazon-like Hunter, who specializes in killing the giant beasts in the underworlds of the great cities; and Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar, two bloodthirsty hired killers, one learnedly sarcastic and the other a straight-man who likes to eat live animals (the Abbott and Costello of London Below).

All this adventure and mayhem is written in a whimsical style, so that the reader is never actually terrified and always retains confidence that the hero will survive. Its tone is somewhat similar to that of Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide series, but Gaiman is not nearly as clever as Adams. Nevertheless, the book is often very humorous and features many memorable one-liners.

The story itself is interesting, coherent, and somewhat suspenseful. It is almost like a Stephen King alternate-world novel, written in an entirely different tone, which means that character development and that creepy King feeling is absent.

I found this an amusing read, but it is certainly not a classic in the fantasy, alternative-world genre.

By the way, I think Neil Gaiman earns an adequate amount of money, because his writings are quite popular, but if he wants to earn more, I would suggest that he dispense with the imaginative covers, and just put his own author's portrait on the front. He earns my vote as Sexiest Writer Ever. He's even better than Nathaniel Hawthorne.