As I read and re-read “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” as a child, I loved following Alice as she hurtled down into an entirely different world, full of impossible happenings and unlikely creatures. Lewis Carroll had originally titled that book, published in 1865, “Alice’s Adventures Underground.”
It’s part of a genre of “subterranean fiction,” stories about going underground, or even into the earth. One of the earliest examples is Dante’s “Inferno,” a poem of fire and horror and things we almost can’t imagine taking place in this world. Literature like Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” and "Foucault’s Pendulum" by Umberto Eco take us to new depths. My favorite of The Chronicles of Narnia, “The Silver Chair,” is partly set in Underland, a world beneath Narnia.
Today, I think of Neil Gaiman as the modern creator of gothic underground fiction. His novel “Neverwhere” explores the world below London. A children’s book, “The Graveyard Book,” is about a boy left to be raised by the ghosts who come up from the earth.
On this week’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, “Going Underground,” we’ll take you into caves and on earthquake fault lines, and delve deeper into what we learn about ourselves as we descend. Do you have an underground novel you love? Tell me about it at listen@ttbook.org.
—Shannon