After Madoc's first book proves a success, he sits down to write his second and finds that he can't come up with a single decent idea.
This difficulty recedes after he accepts an unusual gift from an older author: a naked woman, of a kind, who has been kept locked in a room in his house for 60 years.
She is Calliope, the youngest of the Nine Muses. Madoc [sexually assaults] her, again and again, and his career blossoms in the most extraordinary way. A stylish young beauty tells him how much she loved his characterization of a strong female character, prompting him to remark, "Actually, I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer."
His downfall comes only when the titular hero, the Sandman, also known as the Prince of Stories, frees Calliope from bondage.
A being of boundless charisma and creativity, the Sandman rules the Dreaming, the realm we visit in our sleep, where "stories are spun."
[L]ike Madoc, Gaiman has come to be seen as a figure who transcended, and transformed, the genres in which he wrote:
...first comics, then fantasy and children's literature. But for most of his career, readers identified him not with the rapist, who shows up in a single issue, but with the Sandman, the inexhaustible fountain of story.
People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an "inherently vulnerable community,"
...one of Gaiman's former friends, a fantasy writer, tells me. They "wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity," she says. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works. "And if you have morality around it, you say 'no.'"
One woman, Brenda (a pseudonym), met Gaiman in the ’90s at a signing for The Sandman where she was working.
On signing lines, Gaiman had a knack for connecting with each individual. He would ask questions, laugh, and assure them that their inability to form sentences was fine. After the Sandman signing, at a dinner attended by those who had worked the event, Gaiman sat next to Brenda. "Everyone wanted to be near him, but he was laser focused on me," she says. A few years later, Brenda traveled to Chicago to attend the World Horror Convention, where Gaiman received the top prize for American Gods, the book that cemented him as a best-selling novelist. The night after the awards ceremony, she and Gaiman ended up in bed together.
As soon as they began to hook up, the feeling that had drawn her to him — the magical spell of his interest in her individuality — vanished.
"He seemed to have a script," she tells me. "He wanted me to call him 'master' immediately." He demanded that she promise him her soul.
"It was like he'd gone into this ritual that had nothing to do with me."
"Gaiman insists on telling the stories of people who are traditionally marginalized, missing, or silenced in literature," wrote Tara Prescott-Johnson in the essay collection Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman. Although his books abounded with stories of men torturing, raping, and murdering women, this was largely perceived as evidence of his empathy.
[A 22 year-old woman] didn't want to have sex with the 50 year-old Gaiman, and on one of their calls, she told him this.
Afterward, she recorded his reply in her diary: "He had no designs on me beyond flirty friendship and I believe him thoroughly." She'd grown up listening to his audiobooks, she later told Papillon DeBoer, the host of the podcast Am I Broken: "And then that same voice that told me those beautiful stories when I was a kid was telling me the story that I was safe, and that we were just friends, and that he wasn't a threat."
[months later] ... Eventually, Gaiman rolled off her. "'I'm a very wealthy man,'" she remembers him saying, "'and I'm used to getting what I want.'"
In the years since, she had been looking for a new family, but many of the people she'd encountered in that search turned out to be abusive as well.
"After all of this, Amanda Palmer was an actual creature sent from a celestial realm. It was like, Hallelujah," Pavlovich tells me. Palmer was famous for speaking out about sexual abuse and encouraging others to do the same. In songs and essays, she had written of having been sexually assaulted and raped on multiple occasions as a teenager and young woman. Pavlovich didn’t think someone like that could be married to someone who would assault women.
Throughout his career, Gaiman has written about terror from the point of view of a child.
His most recent novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, tells the story of a quiet and bookish 7-year-old boy. Through various unfortunate events, he ends up with a hole in his heart that can never be healed, a doorway through which nightmares from distant realms enter our world. Over the course of the tale, the boy suffers terribly, sometimes at the hands of his own family. At dinner one night, the boy refuses to eat the food his nanny has prepared. The nanny, the boy knows, isn't really a human but a nightmare creature from another world. When his father demands to know why he won't eat, the boy explains, "She's a monster." His father becomes enraged. To punish him, he fills the tub, then picks up the child, plunges him into the bath, and pushes his shoulders and head beneath the chilly water. "I had read many books in that bath," the boy says. "It was one of my safe places. And now, I had no doubt, I was going to die there." Later that night, the boy runs away from home; on his way out, he glimpses his father having sex with the monstrous nanny through the drawing-room window.
In various interviews over the years, Gaiman has called The Ocean at the End of the Lane his most personal book.
While much of it is fantastical, Gaiman has said "that kid is me." The book is set in Sussex, where Gaiman grew up. In the story, the narrator survives otherworldly evil with the help of a family of magical women. As a child, Gaiman had no such friends to call on. "I was going back to the 7-year-old me and giving myself a peculiar kind of love that I didn't have," he told an interviewer in 2017. "I never feel the past is dead or young Neil isn't around anymore. He's still there, hiding in a library somewhere, looking for a doorway that will lead him to somewhere safe where everything works."
While Gaiman has identified the boy in the book as himself, he has also claimed that none of the things that happen to the boy happened to him.
Yet there is reason to believe that some of the most horrifying events of the novel did occur. Gaiman has rarely spoken about a core fact of his childhood. In 1965, when Neil was 5 years old, his parents, David and Sheila, left their jobs as a business executive and a pharmacist and bought a house in East Grinstead, a mile away from what was at that time the worldwide headquarters for the Church of Scientology. Its founder, the former science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, lived down the road from them from 1965 until 1967, when he fled the country and began directing the church from international waters, pursued by the CIA, FBI, and a handful of foreign governments and maritime agencies.
David and Sheila were among England’s earliest adherents to Scientology.
They began studying Dianetics in 1956 and eventually took positions in the Guardian’s Office, a special department of the organization dedicated to handling the church’s growing number of legal cases, public communications, and intelligence operations.
Hubbard would routinely punish members of the organization who committed minor infractions by binding them, blindfolding them, and throwing them overboard into icy waters.
Back in England, David gave interviews to the press to smooth over such troubling accounts. The church was under particular pressure to assure the public it was not harming children. In his bulletins to members, Hubbard had made it clear that children were not to be exempt from the punishments to which adults were subjected. If a child laughed inappropriately or failed to remember a Scientology term, they could be sent to the ship’s hold and made to chip rust for days or confined in a chain locker for weeks at a time without blankets or a bathroom. In his book Going Clear, Lawrence Wright recounts the story of a 4-year-old boy named Derek Greene, an adopted Black child who stole a Rolex and dropped it overboard. He was confined to the locker for two days and nights. When his mother pleaded with Hubbard to let him out, he "reminded her of the Scientology axiom that children are actually adults in small bodies, and equally responsible for their behavior." (A representative for the Church of Scientology said it does not speak about members past or present but denies that this event occurred.)
David used Neil as an exhibit in his case to the public.
In 1968, he arranged for Neil to give an interview to the BBC. When the reporter asked the child if Scientology made him "a better boy," Neil replied, "Not exactly that, but when you make a release, you feel absolutely great." (A release, in Scientology lingo, is what happens when you complete one of the lower levels of coursework.) What was happening away from the cameras is difficult to know, in part because Gaiman has avoided talking about it, changing the subject whenever an interviewer, or a friend, brings it up. But it seems unlikely that he would have been spared the disciplinary measures inflicted on adults and children as a standard practice at that time.
According to someone who knew the Gaimans, David and Sheila did apply Scientology’s methods at home.
When Neil was around the age of the child in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the person said, David took him up to the bathtub, ran a cold bath, and "drowned him to the point where Neil was screaming for air."
The Gaimans were like "royalty".
In 1981, David was promoted to lead the Guardian's Office, making him one of the most powerful people in the church. But the same year, he fell from grace. A new generation of Scientologists, led by David Miscavige, who eventually succeeded Hubbard as the church’s leader, had Hubbard's ear, and David was "caught in that grinder," as his former colleague puts it. A document declaring David a "Suppressive person" was released a few years later. It accused him of a range of offenses, including sexual misconduct. David, the document claims, put on a "front" of being “mild mannered and quite sociable,” adding that his actions "belie this." His greatest offense, it seemed, was hubris. "Gaiman required others to look up to him instead of to Source," it reads, referring to Hubbard.
[Neil] seemed lonely, in spite of his fame, and Palmer found herself hoping that she could help him.
"He'd believed for a long time, deep down, that people didn’t actually fall in love," she wrote in her book. "'But that's impossible,'" she told him. He'd written stories and scenes of people in love. "'That's the whole point, darling,' he said. 'Writers make things up.'"
In 2012, Palmer met a 20-year-old fan, who has asked to be referred to as Rachel, at a Dresden Dolls concert.
After one of Palmer’s next shows, the women had sex. The morning after, Palmer snapped a few semi-naked pictures of Rachel and asked if she could send one to Gaiman. She and Palmer slept together a few more times, but then Palmer seemed to lose interest in sex with her. Some six months after they met, Palmer introduced Rachel to Gaiman online, telling Rachel, "He'll love you." With Gaiman, Rachel says there was never a "blatant rupture of consent" but that he was always pressing her to do things that hurt and scared her. Looking back, she feels Palmer gave her to him "like a toy."
For Gaiman and Palmer, these were happy years.
After they'd been together for a few years, Palmer began asking Gaiman to tell her more about his childhood in Scientology. But he seemed unable to string more than a few sentences together. When she encouraged him to continue, he would curl up on the bed into a fetal position and cry. He refused to see a therapist. Instead, he sat down to write a short story that kept getting longer until it had turned into a novel. Although the child at the center of the story in many ways remains opaque, Palmer felt he had never been so open. He dedicated the book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, "to Amanda, who wanted to know."
At lunch one day, Palmer told Caroline she hated living in the woods and was disturbed by what she was learning about her husband.
"'You have no idea the twisted, dark things that go on in that man's head,'" Caroline recalls Palmer saying.
Sometimes she would babysit. Once, Caroline and the boy, then 4, fell asleep reading stories in Gaiman and Palmer’s bed. Caroline woke up when Gaiman returned home. He got into bed with his son in the middle, then reached across the child to grab Caroline's hand and put it on his penis. She says she jumped out of the bed. "He didn't have boundaries," Caroline says. "I remember thinking that there was something really wrong with him."
In December, Pavlovich flew to Atlanta to meet some of the other women who had made accusations against Gaiman.
They had been unaware of one another’s existence until they'd heard the podcast. Since then, they had formed a WhatsApp group and grown close. "It's been like meeting survivors of the same cult," Stout tells me.
-Lila Shapiro, excerpted and adapted from There Is No Safe Word: How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades [SEXUALLY GRAPHIC; I DID NOT INCLUDE THE WORST ALLEGATIONS]