Inside the Terrifying World of Neil Gaiman

Hey, have you heard of this guy Neil Gaiman? That’s basically the gist of a meandering New Yorker profile on the prolific fantasist. Gaiman, for the uninitiated, is a wildly popular writer of comics, novels, screenplays, and, lately, terrifying children’s books. Though mainstream critics sometimes neglect his work, he’s got a devoted cult following—roughly 1.4 million subscribe to his blog—which propels his every book to the top of the bestseller list.

“It means I’m nobody’s bitch,” he says, though the flip side is that at comic conventions he feels like “a maggoty log at a woodpecker convention.” The profile also reveals the little-known fact that Gaiman was raised as a scientologist. He’s since left the faith, but says he feels a certain solidarity with the family religion. “I will stand with groups when I feel like they’re being properly persecuted,” he says. (More Neil Gaiman stories.)