If you have tumbled, as so many readers have, down into London Below alongside Richard Mayhew—if you have walked those impossible streets where angels guard doors and the Earl holds court in a moving train—then you know the particular magic of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. And now, having emerged blinking back into the ordinary world, you find yourself rather desperately wanting to fall again.
Dear reader, you are not alone in this longing. What follows is a gathering of books that shall take you by the hand and lead you once more through doorways into hidden cities, into realms where magic pools in the shadows of the everyday, where the world we think we know is merely the thinnest veneer over something far stranger and more wonderful.
King Rat by China Miéville
Before China Miéville built his baroque cities of impossible architecture, he wrote this dark jewel of a novel set beneath the very same London that Gaiman so transformed. Here we meet Saul Garamond, awakened in prison to find himself accused of his father’s murder—only to be spirited away by a creature called King Rat, who reveals that Saul’s mother was no ordinary woman.
What unfolds is a tale woven through London’s sewers and rooftops, where the Pied Piper of Hamelin has returned with a new weapon: the pulsing rhythms of drum and bass. Miéville’s prose carries the grit and poetry of underground club culture, and his London Below teems with rats and ancient grudges. This was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, and readers have long noted its kinship with Neverwhere—both books believing utterly in the magic hiding in plain sight.
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch
Now here is a delightful thing: a constable of the Metropolitan Police who discovers, quite by accident, that he can speak to ghosts—and that there exists a tiny department within the Met devoted to such supernatural matters. Peter Grant becomes apprentice to Thomas Nightingale, the last officially sanctioned wizard in England, and together they investigate crimes that ordinary detectives haven’t the training to comprehend.
Aaronovitch writes London with the loving precision of one who knows every street and the goddess who governs each river. Mama Thames rules the lower waters; Father Thames holds the upper reaches. The magic here is bound to geography, to history, to the very pavements. Critics have called it “the perfect blend of CSI and Harry Potter,” and with nine novels now in the series, there is much London to explore.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Le Cirque des Rêves arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. One day the field is empty; the next, black-and-white striped tents have bloomed like strange flowers, opening only when the sun goes down. Inside, wonders beyond imagining await—a garden made entirely of ice, a cloud maze, a wishing tree hung with candles.
But behind the enchantment, a competition unfolds between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, trained since childhood for a contest neither fully understands. They create increasingly impossible marvels, each one a move in a game where the stakes may be their very lives. And yet—and here is the beautiful complication—they fall quite desperately in love. Morgenstern won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and the book spent seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
In an England where magic has long since faded from practical use, two magicians emerge to restore it: the reclusive, fussy Mr Norrell, who guards his books like a dragon guards gold, and the brilliant young Jonathan Strange, dashing and rather too confident for his own good. What begins as a partnership becomes something far more dangerous.
Clarke’s novel—which won the Hugo Award and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize—is written with such loving attention to the cadences of nineteenth-century prose that one feels transported entirely. There are footnotes referencing imaginary scholarly works, fairy servants with terrible bargains, and roads through mirrors. Neil Gaiman himself declared it “the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years.”
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
In 1899 New York, two beings of legend find themselves adrift in a city of immigrants. Chava is a golem, made of clay, created to be a wife for a man who dies on the voyage from Poland—leaving her suddenly masterless, struggling to contain powers she barely understands. Ahmad is a jinni of fire and wind, freed from a flask in Little Syria after a thousand years of imprisonment, yet still bound in human form by magic he cannot break.
Their paths cross, as paths must in such stories, and they recognize in each other what no human could see. Wecker weaves together Jewish and Arabic mythology with the streets and tenements of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, exploring what it means to be made rather than born, to be powerful yet constrained. The book won the Mythopoeic Award and was nominated for a Nebula.
The Dresden Files: Storm Front by Jim Butcher
Harry Dresden has a listing in the Chicago Yellow Pages, under “Wizards.” He is, as far as he knows, the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. When the police encounter crimes too strange for normal methods, they call Harry. When ordinary people need help with supernatural problems, they call Harry. And when ancient vampires, vengeful spirits, and dark warlocks come calling—well, Harry answers.
Beginning with Storm Front, the Dresden Files blend noir detective fiction with full-throttle urban fantasy. Harry is sardonic, battered, occasionally broke, and completely unwilling to back down from any monster regardless of size. The series spans over twenty novels and has been essential reading in urban fantasy since 2000. If you loved the darker corners of London Below, Chicago’s supernatural underworld awaits.
The City & the City by China Miéville
Here is something that defies easy description, which is rather the point. There exist two cities—Besźel and Ul Qoma—that occupy much of the same geographical space. Their citizens are trained from childhood to “unsee” everything belonging to the other city, even when it stands inches away. To acknowledge the other city, to cross into it without official passage, is to commit the terrible crime of Breach.
Inspector Tyador Borlú investigates a murder that may have occurred in both cities, or neither, or somewhere impossible between. Miéville has created something wholly original: a police procedural wrapped in political allegory wrapped in an almost hallucinatory urban fantasy. It won the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. There is nothing else quite like it.
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
This hidden treasure from 1926 tells of a prosperous merchant town that has turned its back on Fairyland—literally, for the hills that lead to that otherworld are declared forbidden, and the fairy fruit that once flowed down the river has become unspeakable contraband. Nathaniel Chanticleer, Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, wants only a quiet life. But when his son Ranulph is suspected of eating fairy fruit, Nathaniel must venture into the very mysteries he has spent his life avoiding.
Neil Gaiman has called this “the single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century.” He has also noted that his own Stardust draws heavily from Mirrlees’s work. The prose is exquisite, dreamlike, and the allegory—about the necessity of art and wildness in lives too devoted to commerce—resonates still.
The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia
When Galina’s pregnant sister gives birth in a Moscow bathroom, then transforms into a jackdaw and flies away, Galina is left holding an infant and a mystery that leads her beneath the streets of the city. There, in tunnels and caverns, she finds the displaced figures of Russian folklore: Father Frost, Koschey the Deathless, the Celestial Cow Zemun.
Neil Gaiman himself praised this book, saying it “does for Moscow what I hope my own Neverwhere may have done to London.” Sedia writes with a melancholy beauty suited to her setting—a Moscow of the 1990s, where the everyday world is bleak but the magical underground offers strange hope. For readers who wish to explore hidden cities beyond London, this is an essential journey.
Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
James Stark was betrayed by a circle of magicians who sent him bodily to Hell, where he spent eleven years fighting in Lucifer’s gladiator pits. Now he’s back in Los Angeles, and he’s looking for revenge.
Kadrey’s Los Angeles is not the city of movie premieres and sunshine. It’s a dark, violent playground where angels and demons walk the streets, magicians sell their services to the highest bidder, and one very angry man called Sandman Slim is carving his way through anyone who wronged him. William Gibson called it “an addictively satisfying, deeply amusing, dirty-ass masterpiece.” Amazon included it in their “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.”
Un Lun Dun by China Miéville
What if there existed an UnLondon—a city that serves as repository for everything London has forgotten, broken, or thrown away? Where discarded umbrellas might form political parties and buses swim through the streets? Two twelve-year-old young women, Zanna and Deeba, stumble through a gap between worlds to find exactly this place—and discover that a prophecy awaits them.
But Miéville, ever the subverter of expectations, twists the chosen-one narrative in delightful ways. This is his book for younger readers, illustrated by the author himself, and it won the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. The Washington Post declared that “Miéville throws off more imaginative sparks per chapter than most authors can manufacture in a whole book.”
Kraken by China Miéville
Billy Harrow works as a curator at the Darwin Centre, leading tours that culminate in the magnificent preserved giant squid. Until the day he arrives to find the squid has been stolen—tank and all—and Billy is plunged into a hidden London where competing apocalypse cults wage war, familiars have unionized, and everyone seems to believe the stolen squid will bring about the end of the world.
This is Miéville at his most playful, populating London with Londonmancers, living tattoos, and centuries-old assassins, all racing toward various forms of Armageddon. It won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. For readers who loved the bizarre factions and underground politics of Neverwhere, Kraken offers a similar playground, though even stranger.
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
We venture here beyond London into the wholly invented city of New Crobuzon, a squalid, magnificent, impossible metropolis built beneath the ribs of some vast dead creature. Here humans live alongside insect-headed khepri, cactus people, and beings remade by the state into grotesque combinations of flesh and machine. Isaac, a scientist pursuing dangerous theories, accepts a commission from a garuda—a bird-man who has been de-winged—and accidentally unleashes something terrible.
This won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and brought “New Weird” into the mainstream consciousness. While not urban fantasy in the sense of hidden magic in real cities, it shares with Neverwhere an absolute commitment to worldbuilding, to the idea that cities are characters, and to the wonderful strangeness lurking in every shadow. It is immense, challenging, and unforgettable.
Your Next Adventure Awaits
Each of these books understands something that Neverwhere taught us: that the cities we walk through every day are merely the surfaces of deeper, stranger places. Whether you choose to descend into London’s magical underworld with Peter Grant, explore the impossible geography of Besźel and Ul Qoma, or escape to the carnival mysteries of Le Cirque des Rêves, adventure awaits.
The doors are there, dear reader. They have always been there. You need only know how to look.
