For Fans of Neil Gaiman

Before Gaiman's run on The Sandman, superhero comics dominated the form. What Gaiman did was write a comic that felt like a literary novel, pulling in Shakespeare, mythology, history, and horror simultaneously. Morpheus, the King of Dreams, became one of the most complex characters in any medium of the 1980s and 1990s. The series did not just win awards -- it expanded the idea of what sequential art could carry.

American Gods works on multiple levels at once: it is a road trip across forgotten Americana, a meditation on immigration and belief, and a genuine thriller. Its central idea -- that gods exist because people believe in them, and that new gods of media and technology are displacing the old ones -- is one of the sharpest cultural observations in 21st-century fiction. Gaiman does not resolve the tension neatly, and that is what makes it stick.

Gaiman has said Coraline began as a story to frighten his daughter. It succeeded. The Other Mother, the button eyes, the apparent paradise that is actually a trap -- these images work on adults as thoroughly as on children because the fear underneath them is real: the fear of a perfect life that costs you everything. The Laika animated adaptation is one of the few screen versions of a Gaiman work that matches the source material's atmosphere beat for beat.

Co-written with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens occupies a unique place in both writers' catalogs -- it is funnier than most of Gaiman's solo work and darker than most of Pratchett's. The friendship between an angel and a demon who have grown fond of Earth is the emotional engine of the book, and it carries a genuine tenderness that the BBC/Prime adaptation captured surprisingly well across two seasons.