Richard Mayhew has an ordinary life, a promising job and a beautiful girlfriend. That changes in the moment he decides to help an injured girl at the station. The next day this extraordinary looking girl named Door leaves and Richard sets off for work. But nothing is the same. Nobody talks to him or notices him. He has lost his job overnight. His flat has been rented to somebody else and his girlfriend who has broken up with him now has no idea who he is. It’s almost like he’s invisible. Soon he discovers that there’s another London than the one he knows, and that two assassins are after him and Door. In a desperate attempt to get his life back he tries to find the strange girl and enters London Below. There awaits a completely different world full of darkness and monsters.
This is dark fantasy in which bad things happen to good people. The character of Richard is quite real and ordinary. He is definitely not a hero type and that makes him very relatable. On the other hand Gaiman could have depicted the World Below in more detail. It was something I was waiting for the whole book but maybe it was his intention to leave it obscure. Overall, he is very skilled at describing most fears a human can encounter in dark places and to relive them through the characters.
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