jerrykindall pointed to this Interview with Neil Gaiman from January magazine. As usual, Neverwhere is glossed over or ignored. I’ll go out on a limb here and say I enjoyed it more than American Gods, its inventive, tight control as opposed to the sprawl of the latter.

I was surprised to find there have been claims, which I hadn’t previously heard, that Harry Potter was derivative of some of his work:

What was it of yours they were accusing her of stealing from you?

My character Tim Hunter from Books of Magic who came out in 1990 was a small dark-haired boy with big round spectacles — a 12-year-old English boy — who has the potential to be the most powerful wizard in the world and has a little barn owl.

So there were commonalties, for sure.

Well, yes and as I finally, pissed off, pointed out to an English reviewer who tried to start this again, I said: Look, all of the things that they actually have in common are such incredibly obvious, surface things that, had she actually been stealing, they were the things that would be first to be changed.

I had actually pondered less trivial parallels between Potter and Neverwhere when I read it several months ago — the notion of the unrecognized commingling of the magical and mundane Londons, as in Diagon Alley or Platform 9 3/4, and specifically the way one walks through seemingly solid walls to cross between worlds.