At Eruditorum Press, Elizabeth Sandifer writes about Neil Gaiman and Scientology. (Thanks, Bill!) “Gaiman has repeatedly drawn from his childhood in his fiction, however, and this paints a far darker picture. His earliest work to engage with it was Violent Cases, a 1987 graphic novel that begins with its narrator, drawn by Dave McKean to look like Gaiman, lighting a cigarette and looking straight out of the panel to declare, ‘I would not want you to think that I was a battered child,’ a declaration that undermines itself remarkably. Indeed, Gaiman’s accounts of childhood are all ominous and haunted affairs, unreliably narrated from the perspective of his childhood self  and filled with strange terrors that hover just on the edges of his awareness and understanding. He has intimated that these portrayals are based on his own childhood, but never really expanded on the implications of that. Ultimately, however, one needn’t have the gory details to draw conclusions. There is no plausible way that Gaiman, as the only son of the most prominent Scientologist in the UK, was not severely abused throughout his childhood for the simple reason that Scientology is one of the most comprehensively abusive organizations ever to exist, and David Gaiman devoted his life perpetuating that abuse.”

Read more here.