Choco1980 posted:

When I was a teenager, and into my early 20s, I was a super-duper Gaiman fanboy. Heck, I met the woman who would become my ex-wife and mother to my child through a Sandman yahoo group. That said, as I've gotten older, I've realized that he has really big flaws I was ignoring. He's got some absolutely fantastic writing-Sandman for instance definitely holds up, and Overture felt like a return to old friends in that regard as he brought his a-game with him, but he just as often phones it in-Eternals for instance. His novels can be okay, but he goes to the same well far too often. Think about how many of his stories involve a seemingly normal person, who meets a mysterious, possibly magical or alien stranger, who whisks him away on a crazy adventure where the previously thought ordinary protagonist becomes the key to saving everything? How often does he invoke the Mother-Maiden-Crone trope? Really, I would say his best material is his short fiction, as there he is much more efficient and economical with the good bits, not having to add predictive side stories or whatever.