Dear Mike,
I started reading your work thirty years ago. I was nine, and the book was Stormbringer.
At the time it was a little like having the top of my head ripped off and magnificent multicoloured ideas poured in.
I read everything I could find you’d written as it was published—several feet of books rapidly appearing on my bookshelves over the next couple of years. I even read everything I could find by people you mentioned, discovering authors like Mervyn Peake in the process.
I took it for granted that a good author could and should be able to write anything and write anything well in any genre or way, and bend and break genres and rules at will—after all, you did it.
Looking back now, the things that stick are the strange ones that don’t fit, from the Sex Pistols’ novel-newspaper (Irene Handl as Mrs Cornelius?) to the mysterious newspaper-wrapped packages of The Chinese Agent…
You’ve been an inspiration. Or to put it another way, I’m probably mostly your fault.
It’s good finally to have someone to blame—
Neil Gaiman
