Overall, I liked this book, and I'm glad I read it, and I would recommend it to anyone. But I want to say some unkind things about the writing style. (Because that's what this blog is for.)

I don't know anything about Neil Gaiman. Which is to say I never read Sandman or any of his other books before, so I don't know what I'm supposed to expect.

There are some parts of this book that really felt like they were the writing of a high school student. Or perhaps even myself as a 9th grader, which makes this even more damning. Does Neil Gaiman always write this way? I don't know.

It has to do with the main character's feigned ignorance. It's just not convincing, or perhaps more accurately, not conducive to familiarity. He's very proper and British at first, which may help explain his reactions to things, but only a little. When he enters a magical world that seems to defy his usual reality, he doesn't stop and question it like a normal person would; he just keeps going as if impossibilities are excuseable and will work themselves out eventually. In fact, even while reality gets weirder and weirder, he never stops to think about it. His reactions to things, things that are actually a bit predictable as fantasy goes, are not there at all. He should have at least looked up and asked God why He decided, in all of His omnipotence, to start fucking with him all of a sudden. But that would have spoiled the mood, I guess. It's as if the only way for the author to express the character's surprise is through numbness. It doesn't make sense because it's the 90s now, so the main character should have already worked out how he would react to a fantasy world when he was a child, especially with all those 80s movies available to him. It's silly for him to want to go back to his normal, boring life, and everybody knows that except for him somehow, both within the story and without.

It doesn't help that the author omits many small details from every scene. Even though most of the story takes place in caves or tunnels, there is rarely an explanation for where light is coming from. My imagination needs to know that! There's a scene where the characters find themselves standing on a board suspended across the middle of a cavernous chamber. What is holding the board up? My imagination needs to know! I guess I was supposed to be so carried off by the magic of the whole story to care about actually imagining it, somehow. There's one moment in which some other shadowy characters vaguely pass by in a tunnel, and later I realize that from that I was supposed to extrapolate that the underworld is populated primarily by murderous beings that could be encountered at any moment. Wait! That's so incongruous that my imagination needs to know more about that! I guess the author doesn't mind these little details, but there are just too many scenes left blank. Unlike some other fantasy worlds, this one has not been fully worked out, even by the author, it seems. If I'm supposed to assume to know the missing parts, doesn't that make the fantasy even more stereotypical? Either way, I see this as a failing.

The difference between the magical world in this book and the one in the movie Labyrinth is that in Labyrinth we know everything is ultimately the product of Sarah's imagination, so there's nothing wrong when Sarah eagerly accepts something that's meant to surprise the audience. There's one scene in the book where it's proposed that the whole book so far has been a hallucination or a dream, which is a great question to raise, and it would have explained everything. But the main character defies this feeble suggestion, leaving us with nothing. And the character undergoes a magical transformation near the end of the book, which is meant to represent a sort of maturation, or embiggening of confidence, or something, and that's fine except it just doesn't feel real. Maybe this is the one part of a magical story that ought to feel real. The problem is simply that the character wasn't believable in the first place.

I guess this is all just one example of the proverbial error of assuming the audience are a bunch of dumbcakes. Don't do that! It'll ruin your story!

I've heard that this book was actually written based on a TV show. Perhaps that helps explain why some description is missing? Because it's presumed that you already absorbed the ambiance from the TV show?

Despite all of the above, there are some really well written lines and a few beautiful moments that aren't expected in the work of a 9th grader. Some parts are definitely written better than others. It's almost as if two people wrote different parts of this book when only one should have written it. Maybe Neil Gaiman himself changed over the course of writing it. I don't know.

I do very much appreciate that the author explored what happened in the epilogue when the main character went back to the real world and finally decided it was boring. Maybe, even though the character was an idiot, there's at least some reconciliation this way.