Whoa! It’s been quite the whirlwind of chaos, revelations and disillusionment these past four months or so. No, I’m not talking about American politics. I’m referring to the slowly-building news since last year regarding Neil Gaiman’s sexual depredations over the past few decades. Like a deep-ocean tsunami, it’s been surging to shore, but has yet to fully crest in all its destructive glory. The faerie-silver lining is that this scandal has brought Tanith Lee back to the spotlight.

There were online mootings and murmurs hinting at Gaiman's transgressions all the way back to last summer. Two women had come forward to accuse Mr. Gaiman of sexual misconduct. Virtually all mainstream SFF news outlets--you know, the ones we are supposed to trust--avoided commenting. By October, evidence started to pile up and, in December, Gaiman went radio silent. Now, here in 2025, Gaiman has hired the same firm retained by Ezra Miller and Marilyn Manson--apparently, for the same reasons they did. A good idea, since other women have come forward.

I first heard of Gaiman by way of my buddy, comic shop tycoon, Jimmy Jarman, back around 1990. He said something like, "You need to check out this Sandman series. It's pretty cool." I checked it out. I liked it, but the art--after Sam Kieth left--didn't really do it for me. Over the next few years, I read some more issues. Interesting, well-done writing, but just not really my bag.

Fast forward to about 2006. I'd heard a lot more about Gaiman. For one thing, I knew at that point he'd praised authors like Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard and Gene Wolfe. That certainly inclined me more in his direction. A couple of people whom I respected recommended American Gods. I gave it a try and liked it well enough. Clever, facile writing. His "foreigner's take" on America wasn't too bad, but nothing to give de Tocqueville a run for his money.

Fast forward again to 2009. My girlfriend at the time--despite other, loveable traits--was a fan of Amanda Palmer. I was not. Seeking to "meet in the middle" somewhat, I suggested we read some Gaiman together, since he and Palmer were known to be an item--they married the next year. We read Neverwhere, one of Gaiman's urban fantasy novels. Not a bad experience, on the whole. Once again, Gaiman was clever and facile. I could see why other people might become huge fans.

In 2020, a buddy who knew I was a major Tanith Lee fan sent me a link. It was a post from Vox Day's Vox Popoli blog titled, "It's not exactly plagiarism". It was quite interesting. Vox Day--a huge fan of Lee--posited that Gaiman's general framework for, and the general "feel" of, Sandman--The "Endless", with the Sandman/Lord of Dreams among them--were derived from Tanith Lee's "Tales of the Flat Earth" novels, which were published almost a decade before the Sandman comics.

Vox Day had better things to do with his time, apparently, than dig through all seventy-plus issues of Sandman to nail down every parallel. Fair enough. Noticing--often a capital crime in these decadent times--was sufficient. I made a mental note of Gaiman's literary brigandage and went about my business. Precious few SFF fans, if any, seemed all that worried about it. Gaiman was some sort of "genius", after all. I did make an offhand note of it in my tribute post to Tanith here. Nobody commented on my assertion.

Azhrarn, Lord of Wickedness and the Night.

Fast forward to January, 2025. January 14, to be exact.

Matthew Boroson posted this on Facebook:

'This is about Neil Gaiman.
'Ta-Nehisi Coates’ BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME is a great book. Insightful, beautifully written, profound.
Coates modeled his book on James Baldwin’s THE FIRE NEXT TIME.
We know this because Coates was open and up-front about this fact.
George R.R. Martin’s GAME OF THRONES/A Song of Ice and Fire is a great series.
Martin modeled his books on THE ACCURSED KINGS by Maurice Druon.
We know this because Martin was open and up-front about this fact.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s THE SYMPATHIZER is a great book.
He modeled it on THE SORROW OF WAR by Bảo Ninh.
We know this because Nguyen was open and up-front about this fact.
Neil Gaiman’s THE SANDMAN is a great comic book series.
Gaiman modeled his series on Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH.
But you wouldn’t know this, because Gaiman has never given her any credit.
Despite the fact that the main character — a byronic, pale, otherworldly, deity-like character — is the prince of night and dreams.
Despite the fact that every time people see art depicting Tanith Lee’s main character Azhrarn, they think it’s Morpheus from the Sandman. (How bad is this? When people see depictions of her character, they say SHE must have ripped HIM off.)
Despite the fact that the dream lord’s younger sibling is Death.
Despite the fact that other members of his family include Delusion, Delirium…. They are not gods but beings older than gods, and when the gods die, Dream, Death, Delusion, and Delirium will remain. This family of immortal, eternal, unchanging beings, who each embody an eternal abstraction starting with the letter D.
Someone else on the internet, noticing the similarities, flipped open the third book in Tanith Lee’s series to a random page, and lo and behold, there’s a description of a character who was clearly the inspiration for Gaiman’s Mazikeen.
The prose, the characters, the narrative strategies, the mythology, the story structure, all of it: Gaiman found it all in Tanith Lee‘s writing and never gave her any credit.
He became rich and famous profiting from her ideas. People effused over his amazing imagination, when the ideas they praised him for were actually created by Tanith Lee. And, while he was building his name and fame, she was struggling. In the 1990s, toward the end of her life, she complained in an interview that magazines weren’t buying her stories anymore.
A simple “If you like The Sandman, you should really read Tanith Lee’s books!” from Neil Gaiman would have meant so much to her career. To the livelihood of a struggling, less-privileged writer, whose amazing imagination Gaiman was actively ripping off.'

His points are well-put, I would say. However, I have to wonder why it took Gaiman's fall from grace to bring all this forth. Why not bring it up in 2023, instead of 2025? Why not bring it up in 2020, like Vox Day and myself did?

I'll admit why I didn't make a bigger deal of it: I didn't want to devote the time or money to slogging through six years of Sandman comics to prove my point. Tanith Lee was five years gone and who would listen? It seems that Gaiman had to break the rules of his own oblivious fandom to be called out for his thievery.

Something I'll call out right now is Boroson's boorishness. DMR Books--both the blog and publishing house--has been promoting Tanith Lee and her fiction since 2018. A good, long while. You can check out all the posts here. Beyond and much more than that, D.M. Ritzlin has published two of the best collections of Tanith's work in recent years: The Empress of Dreams and The Earth Is Flat. Both collections put Lee's work out in front of one of her core audiences since the 1970s: heroic fantasy fans.

Boroson's FB post inadvertently generated some interest in The Earth Is Flat. He was cobra-quick to call this out, dissuading future customers with this oh-so-necessary edit to his original post:

'Edited again: A lot of people are buying Lee’s book THE EARTH IS FLAT. This is the wrong place to begin; it’s a collection of posthumously published stories set in the same world as the series. The place to begin would either be NIGHT’S MASTER or the omnibus edition of the first three books, LORDS OF DARKNESS.'

How about that? No credit given to D.M. Ritzlin for bringing those tales together for ‘Flat Earth’ fans. I'll point out that Azhrarn--the model for Gaiman's Sandman/Lord of Dreams--does appear in The Earth Is Flat. The same 'dark fairy-tale' atmosphere that Gaiman ripped off his entire career, not just for Sandman, is present throughout the collection. The same--minus Azhrarn--can be said for The Empress of Dreams. What a tragedy if some unsuspecting reader got hold of either volume, hmm? Yeah. Swift action had to be taken, obviously.

Boroson had to call out The Earth Is Flat as somehow "wrong" immediately. So watchful! So vigilant. Tanith Lee died in 2015. Where was this urgent vigilance when it came to calling out Gaiman before it was "OK" to do so? What did Boroson know and when did he know it?

There is far, far more to be said on this topic. Gaiman has only begun to bleed for this.