This week saw the deaths of two great and beloved storytellers. Problem is, one of them is still living.
Neil Gaiman was a widely revered and admired writer. His comics, short stories, novels, and TV episodes have inspired millions. He was a master of the power of imagination, the magic of words. Many lonely and isolated readers read his words, watched the episodes of Babylon 5 and Doctor Who that he wrote, watched the movies based on his stories, and thought: I can do that. I want to learn how to do that. For many years, his New Year's Eve messages filled readers with hope and strength to face the coming year.
David Lynch was a filmmaker. He was seen by some as an absurdist, by others as a transcendentalist. I suspect he saw himself as a realist. His films dug into the best and worst of humanity. The struggles, the dreams, the nightmares, the crimes, the love, all excised and laid bare and exposed to wind and sunlight. His movies and TV shows inspired both cult followings and enormous unease and confusion among many viewers. Time and again people who worked with him came away loving him.
In 2024 allegations emerged about Neil Gaiman, allegations that he had used his wealth and position to force sexual favors from women he had drawn into his orbit. On January 13, 2025, an article in New York magazine's Vulture ("There Is No Safe Word") revealed the enormity of these acts, and fleshed out these allegations in sickening detail, revealing a perverse and manipulative monster behind the mask of floppy hair and soft, gentle voice. The Neil Gaiman that fans thought they knew was dead.
David Lynch developed emphysema after a long smoking habit, and had isolated himself in his Los Angeles home throughout the ongoing era of COVID-19, knowing that contact with the unmasked public posed a threat to his life. The Los Angeles area wildfires in early January 2025 spared his home, but the smoke-filled air forced him to evacuate. It was all too much. On January 15, 2025, David Lynch died.
The revelations about Neil Gaiman resulted in two days of scorn and condemnation, which ended only when news of David Lynch's death came out. David Lynch's death has resulted in an outpouring of love and appreciation, with fans sharing their favorite scenes and clips, co-workers telling loving stories of time spent with him, and many people telling tales of random encounters with him in public.
The loss is enormous. David Lynch's work will live on, a testament to his vision of the world. Neil Gaiman's works are being tossed aside, their characters and stories forever tainted by the true nature of the man who wrote them.
* * *
I was never a huge David Lynch fan. I enjoyed his Dune, an admirable attempt at making a film of an unfilmable story - if anything, I thought it was too conventional, too willing to condense complex details into simple action tropes. My friends were fans of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, which I felt were trying too hard to be weird for the sake of being weird. I enjoyed Wild at Heart and Lost Highway. I didn't know too much else of David Lynch's work, though I seem to recall in the early 2000s he had gotten heavily into furniture refinishing. But he has long had a persistent and enthusiastic fanbase online, and over the past few years I have learned to love him as a man and a creator through the clips they posted and anecdotes they told.
I was a pretty big Neil Gaiman fan. Not at first - I never got into the Sandman comics, and I only learned decades after I had bought it that he had authored "Don't Panic! The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion." My first intentional purchase of a book by him was a used copy of American Gods from the Vintage Theater , the meeting place of my writing group, when the owner briefly experimented with used book sales. (Turned out the copy I bought was donated by a woman in my writing group. I eventually lent it to a girl I liked, who then gave it to someone else before she moved to Florida.) I later bought several of his short story collections in my first shopping outing after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, and bought Anansi Boys in my first out-of-the-darkness shopping trip about six months after my mother's death in 2023. I enjoyed his "Silver Age" continuation of Alan Moore's Miracleman comics. I also enjoyed Bitter Karella's characterization of him in the Midnight Pals online series, where he was a brilliant but tedious magician of imagination - to the point that I considered auditioning to play him in the audio podcast. Neil Gaiman's name became a password among writers and poets, a way of showing that you were good and enlightened and willing to face the terrors of the world with love. In some readings I appended a passage* from his Hellblazer story "Hold Me" as a coda to my poem "Hands," and then ended by holding up the comic book from which I had just read Gaiman's words. All that is gone now. Neil Gaiman is gone now.
* "When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there, the nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel - not safe, but better. "It's all right" we whisper, "I'm here, I love you." And we lie: "I'll never leave you." For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad.”
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