To begin, I must say that if humanity is still around 100 years from now, the general consensus will be that Neil Gaiman was one of the greatest writers of the late 2oth/early 21st century, regardless of genre. The passage of time will let prejudices against comic book writers and genre fiction* fade, and Gaiman's beautiful prose will remain. Here is one of my favorite bits of Gaiman. It's from Neverwhere (as in my post on Raymond Chandler, I'll give a plain, stripped-down rendering of the passage followed by the original):
When it rains it pours. Or, everything always seems to happen at once.
And now Gaiman:
Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.
This is just brilliant. First, it uses a very nice personification. Who hasn't felt that "events" are sentient -- that they get together at the corner bar and decide how they can really mess up your life in one fell swoop? I know I have.
Second is its style. I find that Gaiman's stories, even the most modern, have a fairy-tale feel. Not simply because of the supernatural or fantastical elements they contain, but also because they give a sense that the reader is sitting by a fire, with a time-worn elder telling the tale. The sentence is a perfect example. Gaiman sets out a truism, and then proceeds in the following pages to provide a superlative example of that truism. Now, one could edit out the sentence and the following pages would make perfect sense. The plot would still be sound and the characters would still be themselves, but it would take out that "something" that makes the story special. Gaiman has a unique voice; it would be hard to mistake one of his stories for some other author's. And that is why his writing pops.
*In my not so humble opinion, literary fiction is a genre, just like mystery, romance, or science fiction; it has its own rules and conventions that must be followed. I won't mention any names, but seriously how many times in literary fiction do we meet middle-aged white men who have lost their passion for their wives, feel their jobs are soul-crushing, and that they. Must. Do. Something...Someday, I'll have to write a full post on this topic.