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Students of Alamogordo High School in New Mexico looking for a little Neil Gaiman in their lives will have to be careful of where they look for it. The mother of one of the school’s students has managed to get the author’s mid-’90s novel Neverwhere removed from the school’s shelves for being “inappropriate” for teenagers.
“I cannot read this to you and put it on the news,” Nancy Wilmott told KRQE when talking about the book. “It’s too inappropriate. It’s that bad.”
The novel, which was originally released to tie in with the television series of the same name in 1996 and then re-released in an expanded edition a decade later, centers around one man’s discovery of a hidden world that exists underneath the streets of London, England.
“I trusted the school district to pick proper material, and this is not,” Wilmott explained. “A parent can’t read a 400-page book to find out if it’s appropriate. You rely on your school to do that for you.”
STORY: Neil Gaiman’s ‘Ocean’ Becomes a Street
According to officials for the high school, Wilmott’s complaint was the first about the book in the nine years that it has been on the curriculum. On Twitter, Gaiman — currently on tour promoting his new release, Fortunately, The Milk — responded to the news by asking, “Is anyone fighting back?”
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