Sick Humor
Gaiman is one of those authors who is adept at introducing a little sick humor into imagery with just enough succinct power to make it effective, but without inviting it to hang around and wear out its welcome. All it really takes to do the sick humor thing well is a pointed little comment to underline the visual effects. Some can do it, others cannot:
“Someone stumbled into him, cursed and walked away. Richard was lying prone on the platform, in the rush-hour glare. The side of his face was sticky and cold. He pulled his head up off the ground. He had been lying in a pool of his own vomit. At least, he hoped it was his own.”
Girls
Another talent Gaiman has been blessed with is the ability to use imagery well to describe young girls. Coraline, for instance, is one extraordinarily good effective example. The girl described here is no Coraline, of course, but he makes it so easy to picture her in your mind:
“The homeless girl didn’t say anything. She looked bad: pale, beneath the grime and brown-dried blood, and small. She was dressed in a variety of clothes thrown over each other: odd clothes, dirty velvets, muddy lace, rips and holes through which other layers and styles could be seen. She looked, Richard thought, as if she’d done a midnight raid on the History of Fashion section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and was still wearing everything she’d taken. Her short hair was filthy, but looked like it might have been a dark reddish color under the dirt.”
Rimshot!
One of the joys of reading Gaiman is that he is one of those rare writers who can make you laugh out loud. William Goldman does it in The Princess Bride. Douglas Adams can do it in every book he ever wrote. Gaiman is like that. He can make you laugh out loud and what is really weird, as in this imagery, is he can even do it when the joke isn’t funny. It’s all in the telling:
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There was a man walked into a bar. No, he wasn’t a man. That’s the joke. Sorry. He was a horse. A horse … no … a piece of string. Three pieces of string. Right. Three pieces of string walk into a bar...He asks for a drink for himself and one for each of his friends. And the barman says, we ‘don’t serve pieces of string here.’ To one of the pieces of string. So. It goes back to its friends and says they ‘don’t serve strings here.’ And it’s a joke, so the middle one does it too, three of them, you see, then the last one, he ties himself around the middle and he pulls the end of him all out. And he orders a drink…Three drinks. Right. And the barman says, here, ‘Aren’t you one of those pieces of string?’ And he says, the piece of string, he says, no. ‘I’m a frayed knot.’”
Like the Solo in “Go Your Own Way”
Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar solo in the song “Go Your Own Way” is notable for the way it begins in the middle of the song, drops out for a while and then comes roaring back to drive the tune through its ferocious end. Though not in the world of rock guitar solos, this is a time-honored tradition in the creative arts. Gaiman does something quite similar when he introduces imagery near the top of a page, leaves it and then comes back to transform it near the end of the same page:
“He walked in, and Richard, feeling like a small and ineffectual dog yapping at the heels of a postman, follow him in.”
And then, a couple of short paragraphs later:
“Richard suddenly realized he was very, very scared, like a small dog who had just discovered that what he had thought to be a postman was in fact an enormous dog-eating alien from the kind of film that Jessica had no time for.”
