Few modern writers have the cultural cachet (and the fanatical following) of Neil Gaiman, whose works have been adapted into everything from the stop-motion animated Coraline to the hit Starz series American Gods to the upcoming miniseries Good Omens. The mere publication of something with Gaiman’s name on it is enough to command attention.

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Which makes it all the more surprising that a brand-new Gaiman-derived miniseries—with his name in the title, and with brief appearances by Gaiman himself in every episode—debuted last week to basically no fanfare.

So why haven’t you heard about Neil Gaiman’s Likely Stories? Though it aired on Sky TV in the United Kingdom, Likely Stories is exclusive to Shudder—a horror-centric video-on-demand channel that costs $4.99 per month—in the United States. But if you’re enough of a horror junkie to subscribe to Shudder, Likely Stories is certainly worth your time—and if you’re enough of a Neil Gaiman junkie to seek out a fresh new adaptation of his work, Likely Stories is worth a trial membership.

Likely Stories consists of four handsomely mounted standalone episodes. (Picture a Neil Gaiman-centric riff on The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror and you’ll be in the ballpark.) My favorite is the first installment, "Foreign Parts," which follows a young man who prefers masturbating to porn over actual sex—and is startled to discover that he has, somehow, contracted an STD anyway. On paper, this premise might sound like a dumb Intro to Writing-style exercise—"What if watching porn could give your dick a computer virus?"—but "Foreign Parts" quickly pivots from the basic idea into an unexpected and creepier direction, and star George MacKay makes the protagonist’s odd condition legitimately skin-crawling.

Squicky sex is also at the center of two subsequent Likely Stories episodes. "Feeders and Eaters" tells the story of a young man who becomes fixated on an earthy, elderly neighbor with an unusual palate, and "Looking for the Girl" follows a famous photographer who remains obsessed with tracking down a mysterious beauty he saw in an issue of Penthouse decades earlier. "Closing Time"—the closest thing to a stinker in the bunch—breaks the pattern by following an author who tells a weird story about a house in the woods he discovered during his childhood over a quiet, boozy evening at a bar.

But even a lesser Likely Stories installment benefits from Gaiman’s knack for imbuing an everyday situation with fantastical menace. These are stories about people telling stories—sometimes directly to the audience, sometimes to third-party listeners who are rapt or confused or horrified by what they’re hearing. It’s an endlessly replicable formula, and all four episodes go down so easily that they’ll leave you hungry for dozens more. Fortunately, if Likely Stories ever returns, Gaiman has a large enough body of work to meet that demand.

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