The Angel district of the Islington borough, for example, becomes a real angel in London Below. Magic and fantasy abound in a skewed urban setting that translates real locations into their mystical counterparts.

London Below is especially fascinating, as it is something like a parallel reality layered on top of the real world’s London. Rather than transporting the protagonist to Narnia or some other mythical locale, the secret world here is London Below, a mystical sub-city beneath the bustle of our more familiar London Above. Richard gives her aid and soon becomes entangled in the strange circumstances of her life and finds himself trapped in her world. The story opens with Richard Mayhew (Gary Bakewell) encountering a young and bloodied girl named Door (Laura Fraser), who is on the run from mysterious assassins. Produced alongside British writer and comedian Lenny Henry, Neverwhere is Neil Gaiman’s otherworld story about an ordinary person plucked from his mundane existence to discover a fantastic reality hidden from most humans. Now that both the novel and the TV show are celebrating a significant birthday, BBC has issued a brand new edition of the series with the Neverwhere 15th Anniversary Edition DVD. Given my lack of other exposure to Gaiman, it’s probably reasonable that I didn’t know at that time that the novel Neverwhere is a companion piece to Gaiman’s first foray into TV, a Neverwhere miniseries he wrote for BBC. I did, however, read his brilliantly hilarious collaboration with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, as well as a singularly original fantasy novel called Neverwhere. Somehow I’ve managed never to read more than one or two issues of Sandman, and the bulk of my impression of the writer has come from the two TV episodes he wrote for Doctor Who (2011’s “The Doctor’s Wife”) and Babylon 5 (1998’s “Day of the Dead”). Over the years, it has become increasingly apparent to me that my arsenal of geekery has been woefully understocked in the area of Neil Gaiman.

Neverwhere series