In “The New Mother,” a children’s story published by Lucy Clifford in 1882, two previously well-behaved little girls turn so bad—dousing the fire and breaking the clock and dancing on the butter—that their mother is forced to go away, and a new mother, a demon with two glass eyes and a horrible wooden tail, comes to take her place. At the story’s end, the girls flee to the forest to live; they miss their mother terribly and long in vain for the chance to redeem themselves. Sometimes, at night, they sneak back to their old cottage, where through the window they can see the glint of the new mother’s glass eyes.

Gaiman’s “Coraline” was first thought too frightening for children. Now, he says, it’s a “beloved text.” Photograph by Eric Ogden

Gothic horror was thoroughly out of fashion in children’s literature when, in the early nineteen-nineties, the writer Neil Gaiman began to work on “Coraline,” a book aimed at “middle readers”—aged nine to twelve—in which he reimagined Clifford’s demon as “the other mother,” an evil and cunning anti-creator who threatens to destroy his young protagonist. “The idea was, look, if the Victorians can do something that deeply unsettles kids, I should be able to do that, too,” he told me recently.

Gaiman, who is forty-nine and English, with a pale face and a wild, corkscrewed mop of black-and-gray hair, is unusually prolific. In addition to horror, he writes fantasy, fairy tales, science fiction, and apocalyptic romps, in the form of novels, comics, picture books, short stories, poems, and screenplays. Now and then, he writes a song. Gaiman’s books are genre pieces that refuse to remain true to their genres, and his audience is broader than any purist’s: he defines his readership as “bipeds.” His mode is syncretic, with sources ranging from English folktales to glam rock and the Midrash, and enchantment is his major theme: life as we know it, only prone to visitations by Norse gods, trolls, Arthurian knights, and kindergarten-age zombies. “Neil’s writing is kind of fey in the best sense of the word,” the comic-book writer Alan Moore told me. “His best effects come out of people or characters or situations in the real world being starkly juxtaposed with this misty fantasy world.” The model for Gaiman’s eclecticism is G. K. Chesterton; his work, Gaiman says, “left me with an idea of London as this wonderful, mythical, magical place, which became the way I saw the world.” Chesterton’s career also serves as a warning. “He would have been a better writer if he’d written less,” Gaiman says. “There’s always that fear of writing too much if you’re a reasonably facile writer, and I’m a reasonably facile writer.”

Gaiman’s two most recent novels, “Anansi Boys” (2005) and “The Graveyard Book” (2008)—a retelling of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” set in a graveyard—débuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list in their respective categories, adult and children’s literature. Yet Gaiman remains somewhat marginal. The Times of London recently referred to him as “the most famous writer you’ve never heard of.” The New York Times waited to review “The Graveyard Book” for several months after its publication, by which time it had won the 2009 Newbery Medal, one of the highest honors in children’s fiction, and been on the best-seller list for eighteen weeks. “I have at this point a critic-proof career,” Gaiman said. “The fans already knew about the book.”

The title character of “Coraline” is an inquisitive girl with distracted parents, living in an old house with a bricked-up door in one of its rooms. One day, she tests the door and finds that it opens onto a passageway. As with Alice’s rabbit hole and Lucy Pevensie’s closet full of furs, at the other end is an alternate world: in this case, a house that is an idealized replica of Coraline’s own, presided over by the other mother, who, Gaiman writes, resembles her real one— “Only her skin was as white as paper. Only she was taller and thinner. Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving, and her dark red fingernails were curved and sharp.” In place of eyes, she has two black buttons. She entreats Coraline to stay, plying her with delicious food (her own mother cooks from packets) and magical toys. But the other mother’s world is an illusion and a trap; what she really wants is to take Coraline’s eyes and replace them with buttons.

Unlike its literary progenitor, “Coraline” resolves comfortingly: the heroine outsmarts the other mother and escapes; in the process, she saves the souls of three ghost children—earlier victims—and frees her parents, who have also been drawn into the plot. At home, the last night of summer vacation, Coraline drifts into a peaceful sleep, realizing “there was nothing left about school that could scare her anymore.”

In Gaiman, the horror is domesticated and made hygienic for contemporary tastes. Even so, when he showed an early draft to an editor in 1991, he was told it was unpublishable: far too frightening for kids. (Gaiman maintains that adults are more afraid of “Coraline” than children are.) The novel finally came out in 2002. Last year, a movie version was released, directed by Henry Selick in 3-D stop-motion animation, with Teri Hatcher playing both mothers and Dakota Fanning as Coraline. It won a Children’s BAFTA and has been nominated for a Golden Globe. The book has spent a total of seventeen weeks on the best-seller list, and is now, Gaiman says, a “beloved text.”

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In the world of science fiction and fantasy, the boundary between writers and readers is highly permeable. Arthur C. Clarke used to go to conventions wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt—an emblem of sci-fi fandom—and mingle with the crowds. Gaiman has adapted that relationship for the age of social media. He was one of the first writers to have a blog—he started it in 2001, and had, at last count, some 1.4 million readers—and he often posts to his Twitter feed a dozen or more times a day. He attributes his recent No. 1 débuts to his ability to communicate directly with his fans: he tells them to buy a book on a certain day, and they do. “It means I’m nobody’s bitch,” he told me. Through the blog and Twitter, readers have a seemingly transparent window into his process. “Writing Metamorpho. Trying to decide if broccoli is funnier than kohlrabi in a list of vegetables,” he tweeted several months ago, when he was working on a new comic. His next post on the subject read, “So far the broccoli/kohlrabi votes are pretty much evenly split. Although several of you think ‘rutabaga’ is funnier than either.” Eleven minutes later, he posted again: “(Okay. The line now reads) Java: ‘Java dreams of giant vegetables. Chiefly rutabaga and unusually knobbly turnips. But not broccoli.’ ”

To his readers, Gaiman projects an image that is at once iconic author-hero and cozy bookworm. “At the age of four, I was bit by a radioactive awesome,” he’ll say, by way of the origin story that comics fans are conditioned to expect. Sartorially, he is remarkably like Dream, who is one of his best-loved characters and the protagonist of a monthly series called “The Sandman,” which he wrote for DC Comics between 1988 and 1996. He wears black: black socks, black jeans, black T-shirts, black boots, and black jackets whose pockets are loaded with small black notebooks and pots of fountain-pen ink in shades like raven. Pictures of his book collection, which contains some five thousand volumes, circulate on the Internet, propagating brainy crushes: “How could I not fall for this guy??? Honestly . . . look at the sheer size of his . . . library!”

“Of course, he wants to become a character,” Stephin Merritt, who is the lead singer of the Magnetic Fields and a friend of Gaiman, says. “He’s not Salvador Dali, but he’s not far off. There’s no hard line between his persona and his private life.” Jon Levin, Gaiman’s film agent, says he recognized his client’s popularity only when he took him to a meeting at Warner Bros. and all the secretaries got up from their desks to ask for autographs. Someone said, “That never happens when Tom Cruise is here.”

Several months ago, Gaiman was in New York for a few days and gave a reading at the Housing Works bookstore, downtown. It was a joint appearance with Amanda Palmer, a musician from the punk-cabaret act the Dresden Dolls, who was Gaiman’s girlfriend at the time. (They are now engaged to be married. He proposed on New Year’s Day, drawing a ring on her finger with a Sharpie.) The couple met in 2008, when Palmer was working on a solo album and asked Gaiman, to whom she was introduced by a mutual friend, to write stories to accompany photographs of her as a corpse. That afternoon in New York, they had been interviewed in the bath: she naked, he wearing a suit jacket that had been bought for forty bucks from a drunk in Tompkins Square Park.

Everywhere Gaiman goes, he encounters women dressed as Death, Dream’s sister in “Sandman”: black clothing, elaborate black eye makeup, and, often, an ankh charm around the neck. (Internet critics deride Gaiman’s fans as “Twee ‘Bisexual’ Goth Girls with BPD”—borderline personality disorder—“who are drama majors and who are destined to become cat ladies.”) Inside Housing Works, there was a great deal of black and much Gaiman-inspired tattoo art. A middle-aged man wore a T-shirt printed with the text of one of Gaiman’s tweets: “Honestly, if you’re given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don’t say ‘What kind of tea?’ ”

At a little past eight, Palmer appeared onstage, wearing a military jacket and a tartan miniskirt, and sat down at a keyboard; Gaiman stood at a microphone. Images of Palmer—mostly naked, bloody, battered, drowned, or morosely propped up at a dinner table—were projected on the wall behind them. Gaiman began to read in a voice that was deep and singsongy and richly theatrical, with a double edge of menace and irony, the aural equivalent of a flashlight held underneath a chin in a dark room. “Very young children made up songs about the different ways Amanda died, killing her happily at the end of every verse, too young to understand the horror,” he read, and Palmer underscored his pauses with dark chords. “Maybe it really was how she would have wanted to go. ‘If you see Amanda Palmer on the street, kill her,’ said the graffiti under the bridge in Boston.” The audience laughed anxiously. “And beneath that somebody else wrote, ‘That way she’ll live forever.’ ”

Like his friend Harlan Ellison, who stunt-wrote in bookstore windows to show that being an author was a form of manual labor, Gaiman doesn’t mind composing live. At Housing Works, he read a short story about a living statue’s unrequited love. Then, as Palmer sang a song inspired by her years performing as an eight-foot bride in Harvard Square, he dug into his jacket pocket, extracted a small notebook, and began to scribble. Later, he and Palmer answered questions from the audience. One person wanted to know where he got his ideas. “Everybody has ideas,” he said. “People daydream constantly, people let their minds go walking.” During the performance, he explained, he had started to imagine a man who went from city to city documenting living statues the way bird-watchers check off rare species; that was when he took out his notebook. “Somebody today asked me if I’d like to make a sort of eight-minute silent movie. And I think I now have a subject.”

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Gaiman got his start as a journalist-for-hire, in England. He didn’t go to college. His first book was a Duran Duran biography he finished in three months, using a clip file from the BBC; next, he wrote a biography of Douglas Adams, in the style of Douglas Adams. Gaiman says that, especially in the early stages of his career, “I was very, very good at taking a voice that already existed and just parodying it.” He describes his short piece “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale” as him doing John Collier. “A Study in Emerald” is his version of Sherlock Holmes, by way of H. P. Lovecraft. The writer Gene Wolfe says that “Sunbird,” Gaiman’s story about an epicurean club that eats the mythical phoenix, “is so much in the style of R. A. Lafferty it’s almost as if Lafferty were dictating it from Heaven.” Gaiman still writes on demand, composing for anthologies (the living-statue story was an assignment), birthdays, and holidays. Now that he is widely read, he is apt to publish even the most ephemeral of these offerings, often between hard covers and with lavish illustrations. Last spring, he released “Blueberry Girl,” a bit of doggerel written for his friend Tori Amos when she was expecting her first child. (“Help her to help herself, help her to stand, / help her to lose and to find. / Teach her we’re only as big as our dreams. / Show her that fortune is blind.”) It spent five weeks on the best-seller list for children’s picture books.

The first time Gaiman recognized his own voice was in “Violent Cases,” a graphic novel, with art work by Dave McKean, that was published when he was twenty-six. The story is narrated in the first person by a character who looks, in McKean’s illustrations, exactly as Gaiman did at the time: mullety dark hair, black T-shirt, cigarette streaming smoke up toward his face, dark aviator glasses on indoors. The narrator recalls an episode from his childhood in which his father yanked his arm out of its socket trying to pull him up the stairs to bed. “Even now, my father is taller than I am—and back then he seemed huge,” the narrator says. “When I read stories of giants feefifofumming their way through rocky castles, the ground echoing to their steps, sniffing for the blood of an Englishman in the way that only giants could—the giants always looked like my father.”

In this world, the adults are unfathomable and contradictory; they smell like strangers when they leave the house, and come home drunk and arguing in whispers. “The stuff that happened in the beginning of ‘Violent Cases’ happened to me,” Gaiman says. “The building blocks were either true or fictional lies, which feel like they’re true. I thought, I’m going to tell it in my voice and use actual things that happened and talk about what it is to be three and be a child who has no power. It’s a children’s book for adults.”

Gaiman was born in Portchester, in Hampshire County. His family is Jewish, of Polish descent on his father’s side. As a child, he was bookish and broody; for his tenth birthday, he asked for a shed and got a kit of pine boards, which his parents assembled at the bottom of the garden. It was where he read: the Narnia books; Roger Lancelyn Green; a neighbor’s father’s “Dracula”; Chesterton, borrowed from the library. Instead of studying for his bar mitzvah, he persuaded his instructor to teach him Bible stories—the Behemoth, the Leviathan—and the secret teachings, about Lilith and the Lilim, which he used in “The Sandman.” To his father’s dismay, he spent his bar-mitzvah money on American comics—a good investment, as he sees it now.

The pivotal fact of Gaiman’s childhood is one that appears nowhere in his fiction and is periodically removed from his Wikipedia page by the site’s editors. When he was five, his family moved to East Grinstead, the center of English Scientology, where his parents began taking Dianetics classes. His father, a real-estate developer, and his mother, a pharmacist, founded a vitamin shop, G & G Foods, which is still operational. (According to its Web site, it supplies the Human Detoxification Programme, a course of vitamins, supplements, and other alleged purification techniques, which Scientology offers at disaster sites like Chernobyl and Ground Zero.) In the seventies, his father, who died last year, began working in Scientology’s public-relations wing and over time rose high in the organization. Gaiman has two younger sisters, both still active in Scientology; one of them works for the church in Los Angeles, and the other helps run the family businesses.

At times, Scientology proved awkward for the Gaiman children. According to Lizzy Calcioli, the sister who stayed in England, “Most of our social activities were involved with Scientology or our Jewish family. It would get very confusing when people would ask my religion as a kid. I’d say, ‘I’m a Jewish Scientologist.’ ” Gaiman says that he was blocked from entering a boys’ school because of his father’s position and had to remain at the school he’d been attending, the only boy left in a classroom full of girls. These days, Gaiman tends to avoid questions about his faith, but says he is not a Scientologist. Like Judaism, Scientology is the religion of his family, and he feels some solidarity with them. “I will stand with groups when I feel like they’re being properly persecuted,” he told me.

Having been brought up in two traditions, Gaiman is flexible in his devotions. “I’m terribly good at believing things, but I’m really good at believing things when I need them,” he said. “Which in my case tends to be if I’m writing about them.” If he had not been a writer, he says, he would have wanted to design religions. “I’d have a little shop, and people would phone up or come into the shop and they’d say, ‘I’d like a religion,’ ” he said. “And I’d say, ‘Cool, O.K. Where do you stand on guilt, and how do you want to fund it? And would you like sort of a belief in the universe as a huge beneficent organ? Or would you like something more complex?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, we’d like God to be really big on guilt.’ And I’d say, ‘O.K., how does Wednesday sound to you as a sacred day?’ ”

Writing comics afforded Gaiman his great opportunity to invent a cosmology. He approached the work strategically. In the early eighties, he started going to fantasy conventions as a journalist and interviewing authors he admired. At one such event, he met Alan Moore, who, through “Swamp Thing,” was transforming the comic book into something literary, psychological, and self-aware. He asked Moore to show him how to write a script; they sat down and Moore sketched it out in a notebook: page one, panel one, FX for sound effects, and so on. Moore’s style shaped Gaiman’s early work; his scripts were fully realized texts, dense with visual information. Gaiman says that an Alan Moore script for a twenty-four-page comic would be about a hundred pages, his own would run to fifty pages, and most other writers’ would be half that.

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With Moore’s encouragement, Gaiman sent a sample script to Karen Berger, Moore’s editor at DC Comics; it was called “Jack in the Green,” and used English folklore to tell a Swamp Thing story. Berger didn’t publish it, but she eventually hired Gaiman to write a series based on an archival DC character named the Sandman. In the original nineteen-thirties incarnation, the Sandman had worn a green zoot suit and a gas mask, and killed villains with a gas gun. Gaiman’s hero was different: remote and troubled, ironic and proud, with an archaic vocabulary and a head of hair like a blot of fountain-pen ink. His power rests in storytelling; he travels through human dreams. With his siblings Destiny, Destruction, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Death, he is one of the Endless, presiding over the universe, but is as flawed and petty as any Greek god.

The first issue of Gaiman’s “Sandman” appeared in 1988. He gave the series a loose, intuitive structure; dream logic prevailed. This allowed him to tell whatever stories he wanted to, about the kinds of people he knew: pre-operative transsexuals, dysfunctional families, mixed-race couples, spurned lovers, addicts, and young adults with tattoos and brightly colored hair. “He’s got incredible storytelling drive,” the novelist Michael Chabon, who has written extensively about comics, says. “The stories just foliate off each other, and mythology and folklore are so confidently and freely appropriated, with such chutzpah.”