Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman. Avon Fiction (ISBN: 0380789019), 1996 (Link is to 2016 edition).
Summary: When Richard Mayhew rescues a bleeding girl in the streets of London, he finds himself drawn into a world under London, the quest she is on and the evil forces set against her.
You have embarked on a conventional but successful career, are engaged to a fashionable and beautiful woman, living in urban London. Then on a date one night, it is as if a door opens in a wall, and out tumbles a disheveled girl, bleeding from a stab wound in her arm, lying in the street in front of them. This is the situation that confronts Richard Mayhew and his fiancée, Jessica. She wants to quickly move on from an awkward situation for dinner with her boss. Richard cannot. Despite the threat (carried out) of a broken engagement, he takes the girl back to his apartment. And everything in his world will change in consequence.
He quickly learns both of a world under London from which the girl has come and that she is being pursued by two sinister assassins who have already killed the rest of her family. The assassins, Croup and Vandemar, show up at Richard’s apartment but the girl, named Door (so named for her ability to find and open doors), makes herself scarce and eludes capture. Richard agrees to help by finding a figure from the underworld, Marquis de Carabas, who helps Door escape. Only Richard is changed–he has become invisible to the overworld of London. He eventually finds Door in the underworld and joins her in the quest to find the entity who ordered the death of her family–and hopefully to find his way back to his life in London above.
This will take him on what is alternately a quest and a flight from Croup and Vandemar in this dangerous underworld of phantom subway lines, courts in rail cars, mysterious night time Floating Markets in the overworld, and sewers. He faces life and death ordeals and encounters with everything from rats and their Rat-speakers, the fierce warrior woman, Hunter, who becomes Door’s bodyguard, and an angel and a hideous beast. Most of the time, he feels himself a loyal but useless appendage, yet eventually finds in himself resourcefulness and courage unknown to him. It’s a quest in which it is not always clear who may be trusted. Yet a bond grows between Door and Richard.
Gaiman does an incredible job of world making in the London underworld he creates, both the physical space and the characters with which he populates it. If you think Croup and Vandemar sinister, wait until Door finally finds who they’ve been working for! The one other fascinating aspect of the world Gaiman creates are the characters who have lived in the underworlds of other cities, including mythical Atlantis, and the mythical foes like the Beast of London, that roam the underworlds of these other cities. Having previously read American Gods (review), I appreciated being introduced to this earlier work, a novelization of a TV series.
Gaiman almost makes one wonder what lurks below our own cities….
