I LOVED Neil Gaiman. His writing spoke to me in a way no other writing did. His writing was a key that opened up worlds inside me, and even now, Sandman is a myth I hold dear, because the King of Dreams was always my king. So many of his stories were catalysts for the creation of new landscapes in my imagination.
So what to do now? Can I still be a subject of a king whose creator is much too flawed to respect? As a writer myself, can I still allow myself to like the worlds he created, the worlds that resonated so much with me, worlds that have helped me get to where I have always wanted to go? Can I still love his stories if I promise to hate him forever?
I don't know. I don't know how to navigate this space. Can his stories stand up on their own? Can I divorce the written from the writer? And more to the point, should I? In a way, I feel like his fans are being punished for his sins. Part of me thinks I need to deprive myself of these things I've held dear for so long because their creator turned out to be too close to the monsters he created.
Looking back, in a reading perhaps too clarified by recent events, it does feel as if he has always fostered a sympathy for the devil, always romanticized the dark genius who creates beauty although he himself is ugly within, always skimming and nudging little hells toward the light.
Should we have seen it coming? Was the con there for us to see if we had only looked hard enough? I remember, in the 2000s, when blogging was still the thing you did to stake your claim to life in the world, he shared so much of his everyday with us: his bees and his children and his dog, that it seemed we had collectively decided we knew him and he was one of us. I now wonder: did he leave us breadcrumbs? If we had paid more attention, would we have seen anything different? It's disturbing to realize that he was a monster even then.
I think I will always envy him his genius, and perhaps I will even keep his stories, but I will always remember him as a devil now. He made lives worse because he touched them. He robbed women of their power so he could bolster his own. And because he couldn't keep his darkness in, he made tiny teacup hells for all of his readers: we who have poured over his words and let them bury in our minds; we who have used his stories as the cornerstones of our own, we who have taken refuge in the spaces he created. The monster in him is forcing us to abandon our years of sanctuary, sanctuary we have literally paid good money for, and our payments have given him a very good life.
In the end, I think my safest course is to take a transactional view. I paid for his stories, and so, in a way, they are mine. But I won't pay my tithes to him any longer. And while his words may have been the catalyst to my own, I have been fashioning my own dreams for some time. I can remember him, but I don't need to remember him with fondness. As in Sandman itself, this King of Dreams is dethroned and dead. Let another one be born.