NEIL GAIMAN IS going to catch you somehow. Perhaps you’ll get entangled in his web through his archly gothic Sandman comics, his myth-bending novels, his Good Omens collaboration with Terry Pratchett, or via his wise, entertaining, bee-obsessed blog.

Maybe it’ll be the film, TV or even opera adaptations of his work – Neverwhere, Stardust, The Wolves In The Walls, MirrorMask, or the forthcoming stop-motion movie of Coraline – that will ensnare you. Or his projects hatched with musicians such as Tori Amos and Bizarre favourite Amanda Palmer.

Or maybe you’ll get a sci-fi boner over rumours about him writing forthcoming Batman comics and Doctor Who episodes. His new children’s work, The Graveyard Book, is as fantastical, creepy and absorbing as you’d expect from a man who is Bizarre incarnate.

Are you prepared to have hordes of over-protective parents storming the gates of Gaiman Towers with flaming torches, angry at you for writing about ghosts and the afterlife in The Graveyard Book?
I remember when I wrote the first three pages. The first line is, “There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife.” And if you’re dealing with the kind of parents and teachers who only read the first line or the first half page, that’s probably not the best beginning for a children’s book one could hope for.

But anybody who reads the whole thing probably won’t have a problem with it. It’s a tale about growing up, maturity and childhood. And one of the things I tried to do in the book is write a story where the dead aren’t dangerous.

Yes, strangely, the dead are the least terrifying people in the book…
There were a couple of reasons for that. I didn’t want to write a story that would cause a kid to run away from a supposedly scary graveyard, where nothing bad would happen to them, down a dark alley where something bad actually could happen to them.

I wanted to remind readers that deaths and injuries caused by other people are typically by living people, as opposed to dead ones. So there were stories that I couldn’t do in this book.

I have an idea for a story in which Bod (the central character of The Graveyard Book) travels through London and gets into trouble – so flees to the first place of safety he knows, which is a graveyard. But it turns out to be a bad graveyard.

Is that story ever likely to appear?
It might. It’s weird – with the other stuff I’ve done, I never felt a driving urge
to get back to the subject matter or characters when it’s over. Although there’s part of me that’d like to write a Neverwhere Two, and there’s a Stardust story in my head where the characters go to hell in a balloon,
and there’s more American Gods stuff… but then I always get that weird feeling that it’s always more interesting for me to go off and make new mistakes.

But with The Graveyard Book, there’s so much more that I want to know
about Silas and Bod, and the graveyard, and what happened to Miss Lupescu, and what the Jacks are doing… there’s all this stuff I’d actually quite like to write.

When Kipling did The Jungle Book, he did two books. So who knows, maybe in five years time I’ll do The Second Graveyard Book.

Did you draw on any books you’d read as a child? What books scared you then?
The story that used to scare me the most when I was a kid was by a completely forgotten English author called Charles Birkin. I can’t remember
the title of it (we think it was The Harlem Horror – Bizarre) – it was in a short story collection.

It was about a man and his wife whose daughter had vanished mysteriously
a few years earlier. They go to a freak show, and in the freak show they see
this horrible golden-eyed monster who seems to recognise them. Then they find out that the guy who ran the freak show was kidnapping children and turning them into freaks.

I was about seven when I read it, and it terrified me. I found a copy of the book 15 years ago and read it again.

Was it as scary to read as an adult?
It was. Despite the fact he was a terrible writer. But I have no idea if
it was terrifying because it was a scary story or if it was my inner seven-year-old going, “OH MY GOD! IT’S THAT STORY! ARGHH!” Which is perfectly possible.

Do you actually believe in ghosts? I love believing in ghosts. I’m terribly good at it. That was one of the lovely things about writing The Graveyard Book – I was allowed to believe in ghosts while I was writing it.

But the only really peculiar thing I’ve ever seen was when I was about 14 or 15. I was coming out of my house, which was the middle of the countryside.
There was a great big sodium lamppost that stood outside the house. And standing under the lamppost was a middle-aged woman in full gypsy attire.
It was early evening, so she could see me quite clearly, and I said hello to her. But she simply stood there looking at me, saying absolutely nothing. And
I got terrified. I ran for about half a mile to a friend’s house and got there in a state of screaming terror.

Did your friend believe that you’d actually seen a ghost?
They believed I’d seen something, but I’ve never known if it was a ghost
or not. There was never any sort of explanation; nobody said it was a lady
in fancy dress, or that on that site 200 years ago there was a terrible gypsy death.

But my family owns a house in Scotland and I recently learned that
it actually has a really evil gypsy curse on it, which is wonderful. And I don’t believe that extra-temporal gypsies would’ve come and hunted me down.

But there was apparently a gypsy lady who was denied shelter in that house
and whose baby was almost immediately swept away by a storm. And she cursed the house. Which is kinda cool. My daughter was rather less impressed by this than I was. I thought it was great, but she just said, “I don’t know how I feel about inheriting a gypsy curse, Dad.”

You have some very intense fans. Who’s been the weirdest that you’ve encountered?

The trouble with weird is that there’s a point where your weird-meter breaks. And after that, nothing seems weird. I remember the moment my weird-meter broke, in 1992 or 93. I was doing a book signing in The Golden Apple bookshop in Los Angeles. I’d been signing for an hour, and a guy pulled up his sleeve and showed me his arm. He had a Sandman tattoo and asked if I’d sign my name underneath it, which I cheerfully did.

So I’m still signing three or four hours later, when I look up and see the same guy. He proudly shows me that he’s just had my name tattooed over my signature! These little beads of blood were dripping from my name on his arm.

At that moment, my weird-meter broke. You could see it banging against the
red zone… and then it just died.

So from that point on, nothing’s ever seemed odd. I did a signing in New York for Mr Punch with Dave McKean, and this girl leans forward and whispers,
“Will you sign my breasts?” So I sign them and she looks down and says,
“Now you’ll never forget me.” And part of me wanted to say, “Actually love,
you’re not the first…”

Most signing tours are a mad blur of pain and endurance anyway. You just have to get through everything that happens. It’s like being on in a band on a rock tour, except you don’t get to do what you do – write.

That’s appropriate, as Amanda Palmer from The Dresden Dolls once described you as “a rock star trapped in a writer’s body”.

I don’t think I’m trapped, I love being in a writer’s body! Actually, I just spoke
to Amanda and she told me she’s just covered a really odd little song
I wrote. It’s called I Google You.

I decided one night, for reasons lost in the mists of several months ago, to write a lounge song. Something that Frank Sinatra would sing in a bar at about 3am, while drowning his sorrows. And I thought about how nowadays, nobody drowns their sorrows at 3am any more – they just go on the internet and find out everything they can about the girl who dumped them.

How did Amanda get to hear it?
I was working with Amanda on this wonderfully strange project, The Big Book Of Who Killed Amanda Palmer. I wrote some text to accompany these amazing photographs of her ‘dead’ body, which honestly didn’t feel like work.

There’s nothing that’s quite as much fun as sitting in a corner of a room while somebody’s taking photographs of a dead Amanda Palmer covered in blood, while writing a short story. It’s great.

Did you write them ‘live’?
Yes, partly because it was performance art and partly because it was fun.

The big movie this year has been a Batman film, Doctor Who is one of the biggest TV shows – did we win? Have the geeks inherited the earth?
I think so. It’s hard to say that we’ve ‘won’, because that makes it sound like there was a giant battle fought between those who didn’t watch Doctor Who
and those who did.

I think of myself as a minority author, but I’m actually not any more. I think of comics as a minority interest, but they’re not any more either. There are things I think of, from Bizarre to The Fortean Times, as being the kind of thing that only seriously speccy people would know about – but the truth is
that those days are forgotten and we’re now the new mainstream.

It’s like that lovely line, “We are the people our parents warned us about.” I actually take enormous joy and pride in that.

Do you have any more great ambitions you’d like to fulfil?
Not as many as I’d like, which is a terrible thing to say. I had a list when I was about 15 of everything I needed to do, and there was a point about three or
four years ago when I went, “Oh fuck, now I’ve done it all.”

But there are a few things I haven’t done properly. I want to write a play. I co-wrote the lyrics for The Wolves In The Walls opera, which the National Theatre Of Scotland did and it was wonderful, but I don’t really consider that to be me writing a play.

In a perfect world I’d get to write an episode of Doctor Who. And it’d be nice to do a whole TV series that I’m actually proud of. I look at Neverwhere and think about how much better it could’ve been.

I’m lucky enough to be in a position now that if I wanted to make something happen, it could happen. The problem now is more about how much time
I have versus whether or not I get hit by a bus.

I’d also like to do an original radio play... But right now I’m just feeling happy
about The Graveyard Book. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.

The Graveyard Book is out on 31 October. Of course