“Coraline,” Neil Gaiman’s compact but beautifully textured 2002 children’s novel, is a modern-day fairy tale with its share of dark, jagged corners. Its eponymous heroine is a little girl whose parents are often distracted and don’t always have time for her. But she discovers an alternative family that, at first, seems to be an improvement — although this Other Mother and Father do have buttons sewn where their eyes should be, and you can bet that’s not a good sign.

Reading “Coraline” as an adult makes you realize you’re never too old to want to sleep with a light on. The wonder of Henry Selick’s gorgeous stop-motion animation version of Gaiman’s novel is that it preserves the book’s shivery, unsettling qualities, even as it expands on, and slightly recasts, the original story. “Coraline” is essentially faithful to the spirit of its source material. But it’s also so visually inventive, and so elaborately tactile, that it stands apart as its own creation. I don’t recommend “Coraline” for very small children, and I’ll warn you that it may also make very big children — Exhibit A: Me — feel very small. In the picture’s opening-credits sequence (set to the most sinister-sounding lullaby music you’ve ever heard), a floppy, used-up cloth doll has her innards removed and replaced, her button-eyes resewn, and her belly neatly sutured, all by a spidery, disembodied hand.

But Selick — the director of “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas,” as well as the charming 1996 Roald Dahl adaptation “James and the Giant Peach” and the raucous grown-up fantasy “Monkeybone” — knows how to impart a sense of delight and wonder to even the spooky stuff. In “Coraline,” the creepiest moments and images are also among the most seductively beautiful. The movie opens with the bored, restless Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) exploring the grounds of the rambling house she’s just moved into with her parents: It’s an elegantly ramshackle Victorian called the Pink Palace Apartments, and in her early explorations in the yard, she meets a nerdy neighbor kid on a motorbike, Wybie Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.) — a newly invented character who does not appear in Gaiman’s book — who seems nice enough even though he’s wearing a skeleton mask. Later, Wybie gives her a doll that looks suspiciously like the one we’ve already met in the credit sequence. And that’s where Coraline’s adventures, springing from her restless wish that her family life could be “different,” begin.

In Coraline’s real life, her mother and father are both writers — their specialty is gardening, even though they don’t care much for dirt. Dad (John Hodgman) cooks the family’s meals; his specialties are slippery, disgusting-looking concoctions that sit in a heavy mound on the dinner plate. Mom (Teri Hatcher) is in charge of cleaning the house, which is why she won’t let Coraline go out in the rain — she doesn’t want to have to wipe up all that mud. And so Coraline, wandering through the house, discovers a secret door and finds, on the other side of it, an “Other” mother and father — with buttons where their eyes should be — who are willing to cater to her every whim. The Other Father has planted, just for her, a marvelous moonlight garden, complete with glow-in-the-dark snapdragons that really look and move like dragons, and the Other Mother presents her with elaborate, delicious and picture-perfect meals (although, curiously, she eats nothing herself). Coraline, at first delighted by this alternative home universe, begins thinking it might be time to trade up in the family department. Maybe she could even learn to overlook the button thing.

There’s a catch, of course, and before Coraline can choose the family she wants to live with, her Other Mother makes the choice for her. Selick — who also wrote the screenplay — has intensified some of Gaiman’s original themes, in addition to introducing a few overtly Freudian elements. This “Coraline” suggests some of the ways parents try to hold onto us, to keep us from growing up and therefore leaving them forever. It also flirts with the insidious rivalries that can crop up between mothers and daughters. (When Coraline learns that her Other Mother’s intentions aren’t entirely selfless, she says in astonishment, “Mothers don’t eat daughters!” But sometimes, at least in fairy tales and in parts of Southern California, they may wish they could, as a way of preserving their own youth and beauty.)

There’s so much going on in “Coraline” — both visually and in terms of its elaborate story — that the experience of watching it can be a little overwhelming. Selick and his team clearly came up with so many enticing visual and narrative angles, they couldn’t bear to edit them down, and the picture might have benefited from some streamlining. But “Coraline” has been made with so much care, and with so much attention to detail, that maybe it’s just as well there’s more of it rather than less. The supporting characters in the story — including the Russian mouse trainer Mr. Bobinksy (Ian McShane), the former vaudeville performers known as Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (with voices supplied by the English comedy duo Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) and the character known simply as Cat (Keith David), an elegant black creature with mischievous-looking eyes — are all beautifully designed. But it’s the thousand-and-one details around all these characters that give the movie its glorious and varied textures. Mr. Bobinsky’s performing mice are hoppity fellows with extraordinarily long tails, who scamper and dance and play (as Gaiman described in his book) musical instruments with their tiny mouse fingers. One sequence features a performance hall filled with fidgety, pointy-bearded scottie dogs. There are 248 of them, to be exact, and according to the movie’s press notes, none of these extras was computer-generated. That means every single pup you see on the screen is an actual, movable puppet figure, although many of the “background” dogs were operated via a mechanical system.

I have to say it sounds a little obsessive. On the other hand, we live in a world flooded with cheap, shoddily made goods: Almost nothing is made to last anymore; everything is mass-produced and designed to be replaced. So even if “Coraline” suggests that the many, many people who worked on it are at least slightly mad, it is also, clearly, a labor of love. Nearly everything in “Coraline” — from the puppet characters themselves, to their small sweaters and shoes (the latter of which were, in some cases, cut from antique Victorian kid gloves), to the numerous miniature props (which include a toy chest full of weird, wriggly toys with button eyes) — has been painstakingly handmade, and although the film was shot with digital cameras, the images have not been computer-enhanced. The picture is being shown in select theaters in 3-D, and while I’m generally not much of a fan of the 3-D experience, the technology lends itself beautifully to the tactile nature of stop-motion animation: At one point I really did believe I could reach out and grab the long, waving tails of those performing mice. The devil, they say, is in the details, and “Coraline” brings them close enough to touch.

Gaiman and Clarke write in an imaginative tradition that, as they see it, goes back centuries, although the “fantasy” label now affixed to it is a recent development. It’s not always a comfortable fit when so many readers associate the genre with pallid Tolkien derivatives. Gaiman, for example, chooses mostly contemporary settings for his novels, often scruffy urban ones like the London Underground (“Neverwhere”) or the ramshackle roadside tourist attractions that inspired “American Gods.” His latest novel, “Anansi Boys,” is like a cross between Nick Hornby and Zora Neale Hurston, based on West African and Caribbean folklore but set in today’s London, and he is the screenwriter for “Mirrormask,” a new animated film about mother-daughter friction by Dave McKean that wanders in and out of a decrepit public housing complex. Clarke won over many elf-averse readers with her uncanny ability to re-create the prose cadences and ironic wit of classic 19th century novelists like Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope; her novel is as much about manners and politics as it is about spells. The two authors, in New York to do an onstage interview, met with Salon beforehand to talk about their shared enthusiasm for British folklore, the tyranny of realism and the cat flaps of Isaac Newton.

Do you two feel a particularly strong kinship with each other’s work?

S.C.: Especially between “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” and a book Neil wrote called “Stardust.”

N.G.: I think it’s because they’re English.

How so?

N.G.: Both of us like primary sources.

Such as?

N.G.: Well you read folk tales, you browse your way through Katharine Briggs. And Shakespeare. You get the sense of a peculiarly English fairy that’s amoral and huge and at the same time incredibly small. There’s a weird change of size and shape. It’s a peculiarly English thing.

I should interject, for those who don’t know this, that in English folklore, a fairy is not a tiny adorable girl with wings, but often a full-size person, and usually very capricious, powerful and dangerous — someone you don’t want to get mixed up with. England certainly has a modern tradition of fantastic literature that overshadows the rest of the world.

S.C.: Other European cultures have more developed myths and legends. You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.

N.G.:There’s a glorious short story that Susanna did. Was it Mrs. Mab? The one where she keeps going into houses which turn into the insides of flowers and nuts.

S.C.: The character keeps looking for Mrs. Mab. When she sees something and it’s small, it looks big, and when she sees it and it’s big, it looks small. It exists, but exactly where or what size it is is not clear.

Do you make this material up or do you go back to the folklore?

S.C.: I do go back to the folklore and to Katharine Briggs. That’s the only bit of the magic in “Strange & Norrell” that I really researched. English folk tales and fairy beliefs are very fragmentary. Scottish, Irish and Welsh are a bit more developed. They have more remnants to pick at. Obviously, though, you also pick out stories from books you’ve read as a child. So I can’t say I’ve been absolutely strict about it. It’s just what’s useful at the moment.

Do you think it’s the lack of a developed folk tradition that spurs the imaginations of British writers?

N.G.: We don’t know! We can lie, though. We’re writers.

S.C.: That’s the theory I’m beginning to come up with.

N.G.: It gets really interesting when you start trying to look for English folk tales. You wind up in places like the Appalachians, reading the Jack stories. Except the Jack stories in the Appalachians have no magic. It’s all gone. So you think, well, they were telling these stories in England and the king in them would have been a real king, not the rich man at the other end of the road. Reading any book of English folk tales, what you’re mostly struck by is the grumblings of the people who in the 19th century went out on the road trying to collect them and discovered that all they had was bits of stuff that had come over from [the Brothers] Grimm or [Charles] Perrault that people had been reading and passing on.

S.C.: There’s a bit more than that — things like Black Annis and the Blue Hag — but it’s very localized. They’re not quite tales.

N.G.: They don’t turn into stories. They’re lovely fragments. It’s almost like England has to cope with something big that’s been lost. Take Stonehenge: I get irritated when neopagans start talking about the ancient legends of Stonehenge and how far back they go. When I tell them that those legends mostly come from the 1850s, they get really upset. In “Remains of Gentilism and Judaism,” which is John Aubrey’s book, he went out and found every single thing he could and wrote it down — everything that was commonly believed about Stonehenge, which was if you chip a rock off Stonehenge and put it in your well, it will keep toads away. That’s it. That’s everything John Aubrey was able to find in the 1640s.

Why is that?

N.G.: Dunno. But if you’re a writer you definitely wind up trying to create stories out of it because it’s the raw material of story.

S.C.: I think the stories were there. The Grimms worked quite early on, and I think the people who started collecting English folk tales came a good bit later.

N.G.: It’s like squirrels. The gray squirrels came in and they were more efficient than the squirrels that were there before. Grimm’s fairy tales, by the time they were honed and put out there, were incredibly efficient.

S.C.: That’s true. They were published in Britain and they were read by children everywhere. Maybe they ate up everything that came before.

N.G.: You look at Shakespeare and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and it’s obviously drawing on a body of stuff that is common. We have bits of things, like the Robin Goodfellow song from the same time. It’s from the same thing, from a bunch of stories, from a relationship that people had with fairies. You go into Katharine Briggs and you may discover that portunes were these incredibly small old men who ate frogs that they roasted in coals, but you don’t really learn any more about them.

Then there’s this strange identification, which is I think a particularly English thing, between the idea of faerie and the idea of the dead. Again, it’s not the clear-cut thing you have in most countries. There is this weird idea that the land of faerie may be the land of the dead. Perhaps it’s where the soul lives.

S.C.: There are stories about people who while walking stumble upon a gang of people dancing. At the point at which they would realize that these are fairies, they would recognize someone they knew who was dead or someone who had been thought to be dead. It could be either. It could be that a live person had been stolen away.

After I read Stephen Greenblatt’s book on Shakespeare, “Will in the World,” I was struck by the association of the north of England with Catholicism, this old, suppressed religion associated with mysteries and ritual, sometimes practiced secretly. There’s a parallel to “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” with the north being associated with the Middle Ages and with magic. It seemed like only the latest iteration of the religious history of England, with one religion supplanting the other and driving it underground.

N.G.: That was occurring in England all the time. It’s a very English thing. Everything occurs in layers. And also the old stuff gets pushed to the edges, the north and the west.

S.C.: Or to aristocratic families who are rich enough to stave off any awkward questions.

N.G.: You’d need a hole big enough to hide a few priests in.

S.C.: And whatever it was that had been suppressed would tend to get put on fairies. Somewhere, I think in Aubrey, they asked people what religion the fairies had. At that time England was all Protestant, and they assumed that the fairies were all following the old faith, whereas when England was Catholic, it was assumed they followed what came before that. They were always antiestablishment.

They also seemed to be holdouts against a rising tide of rationalism on behalf of a magical past. Protestantism tried to purify Christianity of mysteries and priests and to ground itself in a direct relationship with the Scripture.

N.G.: Then again, the English didn’t go for Protestantism because of all that. They went for it because it got them a kind of cheap Catholicism and a happy king. The oddness of it is that England went Protestant because Henry VIII wanted a divorce. It’s not a country full of sensible Swedish people.

S.C.: But that’s not to say there weren’t those kinds of intellectuals there. They came along afterward and rationalized it. Well, it was a mess.

N.G.: You’ve always got a mess in England. That’s the fun of it.

We’ve been talking about the English folklore, Neil, but lately you’ve gotten outside that. “Anansi Boys” is Caribbean. How does it feel to be writing from a tradition that you’re not personally rooted in?

N.G.: For me, my previous adult novel, “American Gods,” was very much about what happens when you’re English and you come to stay in a country that you’ve seen in movies and on TV and think you know everything about, and suddenly you’re noticing these odd little bits that nobody else notices because they grew up with it. And you think it’s weird. You say, “Don’t you think it’s weird to park a car out on the ice every winter and wait for it to melt and fall in?”

Those little cultural differences can really make an impression. I remember being astonished by how many flavors of potato chips they have in England.

N.G.: Gherkin! The English grow up with pickle-flavored potato chips, so I probably wouldn’t think to put them in a story. With “Anansi Boys” it was frustrating. I had the idea for the story first. I had Anansi [a West African trickster god], his son Spider and this other one who eventually got called Fat Charlie. Then I spent about seven years lazily reading every Anansi story I could and finding a book from the 1920s, when someone went out to Jamaica and talked to people. It’s out of print, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I was able to get a copy. Reading stories about Anansi and death, this was all part of it. And then I had to go out to the Caribbean. And then I had to go to my friend Nalo Hopkinson and say, “I am a floppy-haired, white English person and I’m going to be writing Caribbean dialogue. I need somebody to read this and make sure that I am not making an absolute idiot of myself.” Bless her, Nalo read all of my dialogue and offered suggestions where needed. I didn’t actually breathe a sigh of relief until I heard the audiobook with Lenny Henry reading it. Lenny’s from Dudley, but his mother came over from Jamaica, and he does all the accents. And they all work.

I particularly like that fact that you never tell the reader that the characters are black. It’s something I realized a few pages in, and that made me think about why I would assume they were white unless I was told otherwise.

N.G.: If you look carefully, you’ll notice that all the white characters are described as being white. If you’re raised in comics, when you go to prose, you think about all the things you can do in prose that you can’t do in comics. And one thing is that in comics you can see what everybody looks like immediately. So I thought, I wonder what I can do with that? It’s happening in people’s heads. I wonder if I can write a book in which almost everybody is black, and play completely fair — it’s not a trick or anything — but I’m just not going to say “Fat Charlie was a black 33-year-old” because you don’t start a book saying “Fat Charlie was a white 33-year-old.” You’ll have to pick up on cues, and they will all be given.

S.C.: That’s fascinating. I always start out saying exactly what everybody looks like. I don’t know why.

There’s a great scene in “The Phantom Tollbooth” where a character gives the hero, Milo, an envelope and tells him there’s a sound inside it. And the author, Norton Juster, simply writes, “Milo looked in and sure enough that’s just what was in it.” He doesn’t have to describe it.

N.G.: There are so many cool things that you can do with prose! It goes in through your eyes and goes straight to the back of your head and noodles. I love footnotes, because they change your relationship to the text and what’s happening. I like the fact that I finished reading “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” absolutely fascinated with the question of who’d written it. Because it very obviously wasn’t being narrated by my friend Susanna Clarke, here and now. It was narrated much the way I decided that “Stardust” was being written in 1930.

S.C.: Do you know who writes it?

N.G.: I don’t. One reason I’d like to go back and write another story set in that world is that I might find out.

Susanna, your book is striking for its use of a kind of voice that is like the signature of the Enlightenment. It’s the voice of reason that you have very common-sensically describing all these dreamlike things. It’s really a voice that belongs to the birth of the novel. It’s the root voice of novels.

S.C.: That’s true, but I can’t say it’s in any way deliberate. It’s funny, because I don’t think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer. I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

N.G.: But even at the beginning of the Enlightenment, you’ve also got Isaac Newton, who was on one hand figuring out gravity and the motion of planets and also spending much of the rest of the time on alchemy and magic. Also, he was famously the man who built two cat flaps: one for the cat and one for the kittens, which I love.

S.C.: That was Newton?

N.G.: Whether he did it or not, I don’t know, but he is reputed to have. It’s a John Aubrey legend. Newton was out there on the edges of science when nobody knew what the rules were. The joy of “Strange & Norrell” is that you have practical practicing magicians. One of the reasons science-fiction people liked that book was that it could easily have been about a lost science.

S.C.: You get there, to the rational voice, by having everyone argue with everyone else. If you assume magic existing as a technology, then obviously, as with any other body of knowledge, there will be hugely differing views. Once you have them all arguing about it with each other, it sounds very rational.

N.G.: All you have to do is spend any time around any scientists or academics to discover that they all disagree with each other and believe that their way of doing it is the only right and true way and that nobody else knows anything.

Both of you have very distinctive approaches to writing fiction with fantastic elements, so much so that I almost hesitate to call it fantasy, because by now the term is one many people associate with faux-medieval epics.

N.G.: It’s a big word. I like to use “fantasy” to include everything else, too.

You mean conventional realism?

N.G.: Yes, because you’re still making it up. Unless you’re writing about actual real people who really do exist and what they do day to day and then do not decide which bits you’ll emphasize, that could be realism. I mean, if you’re running webcams and just writing up everything, that might be realism, but anything else …

What about all the association with all those Tolkien imitators?

N.G.: That’s so recent. One of the things I tried to do in “Stardust,” and Susanna did do in “Strange & Norrell,” is write a book for which there’s an absolutely solid tradition in English literature, but it predates the idea that there was a part of the bookstore marked “Fantasy.” When Tolkien published “The Lord of the Rings,” those were books, published as books. There weren’t “Fantasy” shelves because there was no genre.

S.C.: The fantasy we’re both writing is drawing not just on the things that came after Tolkien, but on the whole of these things that came before. We’re most interested in the things that came before the genre — that’s really it.

N.G.: Once people realized there was a genre, they started “doing” other people, doing Tolkien. They became faint photocopies. You get these great big books which are set in a medieval kingdom that is basically somebody’s impression of what they liked about Tolkien, combined with what they enjoyed about playing Dungeons and Dragons as a high schooler. That’s not what we’re doing.

Still, you wind up being lumped with it because of the genre label.

N.G.: I don’t know that there’s any way around that besides market forces. I read a review yesterday in Bust magazine, which I’d picked up in a supermarket. I used to quite like it, but it looked like it had been bought by somebody and completely overhauled. They had some reviews in the back, and I said, “Oh look, here’s a review of Kelly Link’s new book. I wonder what they say.” And what they said was that the book was really horrible because it was filled with things that were made up, zombies and things and a handbag with a world in it, and how could this possible relate to anybody’s life? It was basically a review written by someone who could cope with neither similes nor metaphors.

Are either of us fantasy writers? I don’t think so; we’re both writers. But we make things up, and I like the privilege of being allowed to make anything up.

S.C.: It’s about imagination. Jay McInerney did this interesting response in the Guardian newspaper to V.S. Naipaul saying that fiction is dead. It was quite good as far as it went. But there’s this assumption in what he said that what you’re writing about is the world now and that the important thing is to examine the world now. I kind of think, Why? Shakespeare didn’t think it was important to write contemporary Elizabethan plays. Dickens tended to write about the society 50 or 20 years earlier. It seems to me that what writers are supposed to do is use their imaginations. Imagination is one of the most important things we have.

“Anansi Boys,” Gaiman’s latest foray into the same fictional milieu, is a more modest and also a more fully realized book. That’s because it takes full advantage of the author’s great gift: his ability to blend the archetypal elements of myth and folklore with the grit and comedy of everyday life. His characters never stop wrangling with real-world problems — infuriating relatives, crappy jobs, rickety love lives — even when they stumble into some very strange and cosmic situations. The poor slob this time around is one Charles Anansi, a sweet but easily mortified nebbish trying to eke out a humble existence as an administrative worker in London. He’s been saddled with the (unfitting) nickname of Fat Charlie by his charming rascal of a father, a supporting character in “American Gods” and — unbeknownst to Fat Charlie — also the West African and Caribbean trickster god Anansi.

In the course of the novel, Fat Charlie will learn that he has a much cooler brother, Spider, who has inherited all of Mr. Anansi’s powers and prankish habits. When their father keels over dead in a karaoke bar, Spider descends upon his brother’s tidy life and becomes the houseguest from hell, moving in on Fat Charlie’s fiancée and stirring up trouble at work. Fat Charlie enlists the help of some aged ladies in the family’s former stomping grounds in Florida, and winds up invoking menacing, unpredictable entities who soon turn out to be even more destructive than Spider.

“Anansi Boys” is a hybrid of folk tale and farce that freely partakes of the comic wealth in each, slipping effortlessly back and forth between them. One particularly vivid scene has Fat Charlie (courtesy of the old ladies’ magic) walking along the mountains at the end of the world (or the beginning of it, depending on which direction you’re coming from), where he visits a series of caves inhabited by archetypal animal-people: Lion, Monkey, Elephant and, his father’s nemesis, Tiger. “These mountains and their caves are made from the stuff of the oldest stories,” Gaiman writes, and he conjures a primal, rocky landscape that does justice to the claim.

Sprinkled throughout are some of the traditional Anansi tales (Zora Neale Hurston, who collected such folklore, is one of the people thanked in the dedication), balanced by a contemporary crime story concerning Fat Charlie’s larcenous boss. The boss is an avatar of Tiger, who embodies the truly predatory as opposed to Anansi’s naughtiness. “The meaning of life,” Tiger explains to Fat Charlie outside his cave, “is the hot blood of your prey on your tongue … It’s a big serious world out there; nothing to laugh about. Not ever. You must teach children to fear, teach them to tremble. Teach them to be cruel.” Mulling this over, Fat Charlie decides that what troubles him most is “not that Tiger was mad; it was that he was so earnest in his convictions, and that all of his convictions were uniformly unpleasant.”

Anansi, by contrast, is the spirit of play, of jokes and songs and of course of stories. “Anansi Boys” is Gaiman’s tribute to that trickster spirit, as nimble and resourceful as his own imagination.

Our next pick: Philip K. Dick meets Hemingway, Chandler and Carver

The high road to Gaimanland, however, is “The Sandman,” a comic book series compiled into a 10-volume set of graphic novels (plus ancillary books). To people who care about comics, “The Sandman” needs no introduction; it is a beloved, seminal work that bridged the gap between the form’s pop mainstream and its experimental fringe.

But, to be blunt, I’m not someone who cares much about comics. Despite having read and admired works by Art Spiegelman, Los Bros Hernandez, Alan Moore, Chester Brown, Chris Ware and others, I still belong to that tribe of readers who’ll pick a thousand words over a picture any day. I never would have sought out “The Sandman” if I hadn’t already been enchanted by “Neverwhere,” “American Gods” (Gaiman’s 2001 novel for adults) or the sublime “Coraline,” the children’s book he published last year.

Since those last two titles both hit the New York Times bestseller list, I’m surely not the only reader to first fall in love with Gaiman’s imagination via the medium of plain prose. Somehow, though, he hasn’t quite registered on the public’s consciousness as decisively as he ought to. He is, as one journalist put it, the famous author you’ve never heard of, a baffling fact in the age that made J.K. Rowling its darling.

Perhaps it’s Gaiman’s comics background that puts some people off, a prejudice in danger of being cemented by the publication this month of “The Sandman: Endless Nights,” a collection of graphic stories based in the Sandman universe. But Gaiman’s ongoing fondness for the medium shouldn’t discourage comics-wary readers from exploring his work; instead, the appearance of “Endless Nights” should be the occasion for confirmed prose junkies — Gaiman aficionados and novices alike — to make a foray, however brief, off the reservation. Trust me, it’s well worth the trip.

To newcomers, “Endless Nights” on its own probably won’t convey the allure of the Sandman epic. It’s a lovely hardcover collection, illustrated by some major artists in the field, but it feels a bit like a commemorative souvenir program to the main event. DC Comics’ arty imprint, Vertigo, makes the whole Sandman series available in 10 paperbacks, and that’s the place for novices to dive in, with Volume 1, “Preludes and Nocturnes.” Stick with it through Volume 2, “The Doll’s House,” and you’ll be hooked.

Gaiman sees himself as part of the age-old profession of storytellers, but unlike a lot of the tiresome people who go around referring to themselves that way, he’s right. His fiction, in its various media (he also writes screen- and radio plays), induces that blissful, semi-hypnotic state most of us first experienced as children, when the power of a book seemed to erase the world around us, and when reading felt almost like a drug. Gaiman is interested in all the traditional forms of storytelling — legends, folk and fairy tales, myth — and not just in the stories themselves, but the ways they get told. Not surprisingly, the hero of the Sandman epic is Morpheus, the King of Dreams, who also presides over stories.

Gaiman certainly wasn’t the first comics writer to draw on ancient myths, but he could be the first to really understand how myths work, not just as motifs but as nodes of meaning that gain new layers as we attach new experiences to old stories. For example, the Egyptian god Osiris, the Norse god Balder, Jesus and John F. Kennedy are all very different figures and yet — in some fundamental way having to do with how we understand them — also the same. As the British writer C.S. Lewis (a major influence on Gaiman) pointed out, a myth is a story that can be told and retold in very different ways and yet remain essentially intact. There is no original or correct version of the Orpheus myth, just countless ways of revealing it, and even people who haven’t heard the traditional Greek version recognize it as something powerful when they meet it in another form.

Gaiman’s fiction is teeming with gods — most memorably the has-been deities eking out a meager living in the contemporary United States of “American Gods” — but Dream isn’t one of them. He’s more of an embodied principle of existence, one of seven siblings, the Endless, who also include Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Destruction and Delirium. There’s a real danger of ludicrous grandiosity in this premise, but Gaiman counterbalances all the metaphysics with a quotidian funkiness. On one page the Sandman may be facing off against Lucifer in Hell, but soon enough he’ll be sulking at a family gathering or bickering with Desire, who thinks he’s a humorless stuffed shirt.

Perhaps Gaiman’s most popular creation is Dream’s older sister, Death, an adorable, ankh-wearing punkette who kindly leads the newly deceased to their fate. Death is the sensible, peace-making, considerate sibling among the Endless, and when she first appeared in the comic’s eighth issue, she became an instant hit. As Dream sits glumly in lower Manhattan’s Washington Square Park (he’s in the doldrums after completing a major quest), she shows up to give him a good talking-to, accusing him of being “the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane.”

“The Sandman” keeps doing this, balancing the callow satisfactions of conventional genres with a playful argument against the kind of personality that makes someone obsess about such things to begin with. At its most limited, pop culture directed at men is a shabby little tango between fantasies of mastery and self-pity (“Only I can save the world, and yet I can never truly be part of it” — that sort of thing). Gaiman can play that tune, but he keeps introducing new and more challenging partners and steps.

Morpheus, for example, is the epitome of late-adolescent Goth cool, a gaunt, chalk-skinned, ebony-haired hipster who can brood with the best of them — plus he has superpowers! Yet the entire Sandman epic is also an elucidation of Morpheus’ emotional and personal failures (romantic as well as familial), culminating in his recognition of his own isolation and obsolescence. Similarly, “Neverwhere” is partly an old-fashioned boy’s adventure story, but the hero is neither especially brave nor notably gifted, just an ordinary fellow whose only sterling quality is kindness. Gaiman the author points his readers toward a richer, more grown-up way of understanding life and stories than that offered by tortured superheroes, alienated loners or strapping champions. Some say that Morpheus looks a bit like his creator, but Gaiman’s secret twin is Death, a witty, charming escort to the next stage of our existence.

For Gaiman, one of the chief uses of enchantment is not to escape from the real world, but to illuminate it. In “Neverwhere,” when Richard, by association with its scruffy denizens, joins the world of London Below, he also becomes, if not quite invisible, at least profoundly unmemorable and radically unremarkable to the inhabitants of London Above. That’s only a slight tweak on the actual world: I walked past a homeless man yesterday who held up a sign reading “Everyone ignores me.” He lives in New York Below.

Much of what passes as fantastic literature these days doesn’t maintain any fertile relationship with the real. Even the classic works of British fantasy that Gaiman uses as touchstones, the novels of Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton, to name a few, feel insular, like retreats from the world into an imaginary realm untouched by modernity. Gaiman, on the other hand, is ever eager to expand his compass and take in everything, the new mixing exuberantly with the old. “The Sandman” contains everything from vamps on old-time horror comics, to ersatz (but convincing) African folk tales to references to the devastation of the first Gulf War to snapshots of urban life featuring single mothers, transvestites and a touchingly devoted pair of lesbian lovers. In “Neverwhere,” London’s Tube becomes as mysterious, romantic and perilous as Olde England’s Forest of Arden.

Nevertheless, Gaiman has never lost touch with the spellbinding voice of classic British fantasy. He reproduces it perfectly in “Coraline,” his most polished piece of writing yet, as far as prose is concerned; every sentence is distilled to its essence. Gaiman, like Lewis, builds his narratives from images; even when the connective tissue doesn’t hold up (as it sometimes doesn’t in “American Gods” and mostly doesn’t in the fairytale-like novel “Stardust”), the individual pictures retain their potency.

In “Coraline,” a little girl wanders through a magical door in her family’s sitting room to discover a replica of her house on the other side, presided over by her “other mother,” a sinister and overly affectionate person with shiny black buttons instead of eyes. The other mother holds her captive, demanding that Coraline acquire her own pair of buttons. It’s a very, very creepy book, but also funny and, despite its weirdness, true to life about the way certain adults treat children. A friendly if sarcastic cat explains the other mother’s motivations to Coraline: “She wants something to love, I think … Something that isn’t her. She might want something to eat as well. It’s hard to tell with things like her.”

“American Gods,” Gaiman’s most recent major novel, shows how this generous and resourceful writer keeps enlarging his scope. The task he sets for himself — building a fantastic epic on a core of mythic material that feels authentically American — is a tough one. The revelation in the novel’s climax doesn’t ring entirely true, but the method Gaiman uses to get there does.

The battered hero of classic hardboiled detective fiction is, in a way, the Hercules of our time. Gaiman sends a man like that, ex-con Shadow Moon, into noir’s typically skanky situations, and sets him up for the usual rounds of beatings and betrayals. But Shadow’s companions and adversaries in these adventures are a multicultural potluck of defunct gods and demons, withering away due to lack of worshippers, hustling and grifting in order to get by while they plot their big comeback. Not only did Gaiman learn enough about an obscure dualistic Slavic deity to slip him into the novel, he also researched enough about prison life to make Shadow’s memories of that seem convincing as well.

There’s a story in one of the early Sandman comics in which a writer who has angered Morpheus is cursed by the Dream King with a surplus of ideas. He goes staggering through the streets of London, plagued by scenarios that come so fast he can’t set them down. It’s a pop-Borges cavalcade: “A city in which the streets are paved with time … a were-goldfish … a man who inherits a library card to the Library of Alexandria.” You get the impression this guy could be yet another aspect of Gaiman, whose imagination is forever making odd and fruitful leaps to parts previously unknown, leaps that somehow always bring him back home again. In Gaiman’s case, though, this onslaught is no curse. For those of us lucky enough to have discovered him, it’s a blessing.