If the book world has rock stars, Neil Gaiman is one of them. Prolific across numerous platforms — novels, comics, television, movies, Twitter, the occasional song — he has legions of fans who will follow him wherever he ventures. His new book, “Norse Mythology,” is a retelling of ancient stories featuring Thor, Odin and Loki. It debuted atop the New York Times best seller list.

Born in Hampshire, England, Gaiman lives now near Minneapolis. He will be at the Civic Theatre in downtown San Diego on March 29 at 8 p.m. for an evening of story telling and questions from the audience. Tickets start at $25.

Q: I understand you first got interested in Norse mythology through comic books. What was it about the stories that attracted you?

A: I would have been 7 years old at the time and there were these English reprints of American comic books. My first encounter with Thor would have been the Jack Kirby-Stan Lee book with (crippled doctor) Don Blake trapped in a cave, finding a stick and slamming it down on the ground and it turning into the hammer of Thor and then he transforms into the mighty Thor.


I loved this. I thought it was wonderful. I didn’t know you could do this. I spent the next couple of years banging every stick I found onto the ground just to see if it would transform into the hammer. It didn’t, but I now had a complete fascination with Norse mythology.

Then I got hold of an English book for children called “Myths of the Norsemen,” by Roger Lancelyn Green, and these weren’t the Marvel comics. This was something much rougher-hewn, and also much darker and weirder. Now Thor was this red-bearded hulking lout with a hammer who could out-drink you and out-fight you. Loki, instead of being a god of mischief, was a strange, complicated entity. Odin was shadowy and everything was all about the end of the world. I was hooked.

Q: Why did you decide to do your own versions?

A: I’ve been retelling Norse myths in my own way for many, many years. I put Norse characters into “Sandman.” When I was researching “American Gods,” I went back to the original sources, to the prose Edda and the poetic Edda, and I became fascinated even more. I just loved the myths.


But it wasn’t until I had lunch about eight years ago with an editor and he asked if I had any interest in retelling these stories for a new generation that I decided it would be an interesting thing to do. And it took me about four years of thinking and hesitating and trying to figure out what kind of language I would use, how to echo these short declarative sentences, whether or not I wanted to include the poetry, how I would do this. In each case, what I wanted to do was really play absolutely fair with the stories we had in the original sources.

Q: What were you comfortable making up?

I may give characters motivations, they may now have an interior world, you may know what they are thinking, but I’m not changing the story. It’s almost as if you are telling a joke. You may have read a joke or someone told you a joke and you remember the shape of it. You know where you are heading with the punchline. But how you tell the joke is up to you.

Q: In one of the stories, “The Master Builder,” the characters talk about building a wall to keep foreigners out. Did you think of these stories as political when you were writing them?


A: I wrote that one three years ago and I was retelling a story that was probably 1,500 years ago, so I definitely didn’t think of it as a contemporary story. What I think is really interesting is if a story is good, and is good in the way that it tells us real things and important things about human nature, about who we are, about how we behave, how we react, then it’s going to remain relevant.

I remember being in New York the other day and reading it in the town hall and when I got to the point where Odin says, “We’re going to build a wall,” the entire hall erupted. And I thought, “Well, there you go. These stories may be old, but they are definitely relevant.”

Q: You started out working for newspapers and magazines. How did that shape you as a writer?

A: It shaped me in three very huge and important ways. The first was it taught me economy. As a journalist, you know that you have a certain number of words to fill. It may be 800 words, it may be 3,000 words, but you don’t have any more than that. At the same time, I had to learn to work anywhere. If the copy is due at 4 o’clock that afternoon, and it’s now 1:30 and you are in a loud newsroom and people are shouting and there is stuff going on, you become very single-minded. You just focus and you tune everything else out and at 4 o’clock it’s on the editor’s desk. That’s how you do it.


Those were the two good things I took from journalism. The thing I also took from it is I wasn’t a journalist. I remember the moment I learned this. I got a phone call from an editor saying, “We want you to do a story on how playing Dungeons & Dragons drives people to Satanism, madness or suicide.” And I said, “No.” She said, “What do you mean, no?” I said, “I don’t think I’m working for you anymore,” and I put down the phone.

I just thought it would be so much more honest if I’m making stuff up and labeling it as made-up stuff rather than obeying any kind of editorial edict about what the story was that I’m looking for — essentially writing stuff that reinforces worldviews that may or may not actually have anything to do with reality.

Q: There were some alternative facts going on even then.

A: Even back then. There were definitely alternative facts. And the expression fake news — I don’t know that that was fake news, but it was definitely tabloid news. And tabloid news, like the Satanism-in-our-schools madness of the 1980s, with people being imprisoned and stuff, only years later did we look at it and say, “You know, none of this stuff was actually happening and it’s all a bit mad.”


Q: To what do you attribute being so prolific?

A: You know what’s funny? In my head, I’m not prolific. But I think there’s a level at which if you simply keep working, there comes a point where you have a tremendous body of work behind you. I’m enormously fortunate. I like writing. I like telling stories of all kinds.

Q: Do you ever worry about writing too much?

A: I guess I do. I look at writers whose work I love, like G.K. Chesterton, and I think, “You know, you would have been a better writer had you written less. Any idea you had, it became a story.” So I think maybe I should write less.


But if you look at my adult novels, I probably don’t write enough. Most writers of adult novels write one a year, or one every couple of years. Since 2000, I’ve written “American Gods,” “Anansi Boys,” and the “Ocean at the End of the Lane.” That’s three in 17 years and now I’m writing another one. You could say the same for my children’s books. Since 2000, I’ve written “Coraline,” “The Graveyard Book,” “Fortunately, the Milk” and a few picture books. Why don’t I write more?

So I feel there’s always more I could be doing, even as I worry that I write too much.

“Norse Mythology,” by Neil Gaiman, W.W. Norton, 304 pages.


john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com; (619) 293-2236