The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

We’ve no doubt all heard the cliche, “It takes a village to raise a child.” But award-winning author Neil Gaiman turns this phrase on its head and, with The Graveyard Book, explores a much more interesting premise: “It takes a graveyard to raise a child.” The prospect leads to tantalizing questions. For those who can imagine it, can the dead teach a child how to live? Can the dead protect a child from being killed?

In this coming of age story, primed for younger readers—say, ages 8-13 years—we follow the adventures of Nobody Owens, a toddler who survived the murder of his family and is then raised by the supernatural denizens of the local graveyard. The story setup is analogous to, even down to the title, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. In The Graveyard Book, young Nobody, or Bod for short, learns the ways of the world from the perspective of the graveyard. There in his home and playground of tombs, gravestones, and bones, Bod comes to know ghosts, a vampiric mentor named Silas, a witch named Liza Hempstock, a guardian of an ancient Celtic burial mound called a Sleer, ghouls, and even Death herself. His education is rather unique as well, since he learns history from (dead) people who were actually at the historical events. He also acquires ghostly skills, like fading from view and passing through walls. But Bod, ominously, learns that the killer of his family is still out there beyond the graveyard looking for him. This “inside the graveyard is safe, and outside the graveyard is dangerous and scary” sets up the main conflict of the story, which resolves in a bittersweet ending.

Gaiman tells a great tale, and this one will not disappoint. The characters are memorable, the action suspenseful, and the scenes and descriptions vivid—especially Bod’s turn through the Lovecraftian kingdom of the ghouls. However, Gaiman created a bit of a challenge for himself in that the story follows an 18 month old Bod at the beginning of the book to when Bod becomes a teenager by the end of the book. This is a lot of temporal ground to cover, and so especially at the beginning, the story is a bit episodic in nature as we glimpse Bod at ages six, eight, ten, eleven, and thirteen. In fact, during these early chapters the story loses the main plot arc of Bod’s family’s killer, while the reader follows the early years of Bod growing up in the graveyard. The main story arc picks back up though once Bod is many years older, and from there the book really comes into its own.

Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is a story that is creative, touching, suspenseful, and funny. The reader is almost compelled to turn the page in order to find out what happens next. This, it seems to me, is what storytelling is all about.