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Originally Posted by 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 Ghűlheim 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.
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The Publishers Weekly article in my previous post as this to say about his influences.
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Do you have a favorite story among them?
Of all the stories in The Graveyard Book my favorite is chapter five, “Danse Macabre,” partly because it’s not quite like the others. And that story is this strange little thing where the dead and the living get together in the middle of the night in this odd, wonderful dance, and then all the living are confused and sort of forget about [it] afterwards. There are two touchstones in terms of authors I’ve loved for The Graveyard Book. The obvious one is Rudyard Kipling, but the less obvious one is P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins stories. This chapter is just the sort of thing that would happen in Mary Poppins,where everyone in town would be off flying about and then not remember it afterward.
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