[fantasyfan]

Of course The Jungle Book is the main inspiration of Neil Gaiman’s work but I noticed a nod to his interest in Norse Mythology in his description of Ghûlheim with its Nordic sounding name. But there is also a possible sly reference to H. P. Lovecraft with that writer’s description of alien landscapes having “obscene” mind-bending, horrifying angles. Note the following passage:

“Bod see that all of the angles were wrong–that the walls sloped crazily, that it was every nightmare he had ever endured made into a place, like a huge mouth of jutting teeth. It was a city that had been built just to be abandoned, in which all the fears and madnesses and revulsions of the creatures who built it were made into stone.”

Personally, I think that the names of the evil cult have Chestertonian overtones. The Man Who Was Thursday has a series of characters named after days of the week. In a wonderful short story, The Queer Feet, Chesterton creates an evil hierarchy of power called “The Twelve True Fishermen.”

While I am not certain at all that Gaiman was definitely influenced by G. K. Chesterton, I do feel that he has something of the same kind of quirky wit.