［英］尼爾·蓋曼（1960 ～ ）

尼爾·蓋曼是近十年來歐美文壇崛起的最耀眼明星，被視為新一代幻想文學的代錶人物。其創作領域橫跨幻想小說、科幻小說、恐怖小說、兒童小說、漫畫及歌詞。他的作品不但部部暢銷，而且獲奬無數。恐怖小說大師斯蒂芬·金稱贊他是一個“裝滿瞭故事的寶庫”。《文學傳記辭典》將他列為十大後現代作傢之一。

Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her - and the life he knows vanishes like smoke. Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won't stop for him, his landlord rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness - to a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere. For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the cause of her family's slaughter, and in doing so preserve this strange underworld kingdom from the malevolence that means to destroy it. And with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew must now join the Lady Door's entourage in their determined - and possibly fatal - quest. For the dread journey ever-downward - through bizarre anachronisms and dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time - is Richard's final hope, his last road back to a "real" world that is growing disturbingly less real by the minute.