Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is the well-known creator of the fine Sandman series and also the author of some great novels. I discovered two great pieces of his work lately:

In "Coraline" he writes about a little girl discovering some kind of parallel universe - intense, scary, exciting. A novel for all ages, even if it might be too dark for younger children.

The book "Creatures of the Night" contains two stories about animals and scary incidents. The first one is about a mysterious black cat, the second one about a foundling girl and an owl. I liked the stories - but I loved the artwork (done by Michael Zulli).

Coraline
The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring....
In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close. The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own.
Only it's different.
At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind-up angels that flutter around the bedroom, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer, little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go.
Other children are trapped there as well, lost souls behind the mirrors. Coraline is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight with all her wits and all the tools she can find if she is to save the lost children, her ordinary life, and herself.
Critically acclaimed and award-winning author Neil Gaiman will delight readers with his first novel for all ages.

Creatures of the Night
From the New York Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman comes this fine collection, featuring two magical and disturbing stories lushly adapted to comics by veteran painter Michael Zulli (The Last Temptation). Newly rewritten by Gaiman for this graphic novel, these two ominous stories from the author’s award-winning prose, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions, feature animals and people not being quite what they seem. In The Price, a black cat like a small panther arrives at a country home and is soon beset by mysterious and vicious wounds. What is he fighting every night that could do this, and why does he persist? The Daughter of Owls recounts an eerie old tale of a foundling girl who was left with an owl pellet as a newborn on the steps of the Dymton Church. She was soon cloistered away in a local convent, but by her fourteenth year word of her beauty had spread—and those who would prey upon her faced unforeseen consequences.


publisher: panini comics (german), harper collins, dark horse (english),

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