Neverwhere Reading Order

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996) is his first adult novel — Richard Mayhew, an ordinary Londoner, helping an injured girl on the street and tumbling out of ordinary London into London Below, the hidden city of the people who have fallen through the cracks. Gaiman originally wrote Neverwhere as a BBC television series and then novelized it; the novel version, which he considers the definitive version, is more richly detailed than the series. It established the urban fantasy template — the magical world hidden beneath an ordinary contemporary city — that Gaiman returned to and that dozens of subsequent writers adopted. The novel's London — the Angel Islington, the Black Friars, the Earl's Court — is one of the great comic inventions in contemporary fantasy.