The Graveyard Book

By  Neil Gaiman
Dave Mckean, Illustrator
2008,  HarperCollins Publisher
Review by Debra Louise Scott

Neil Gaiman has once again brought the sinister into the realm of normal. This is a ghost/vampire/werewolf story, except these traditionally scary characters are the good guys while the normal mortal people, with a few exceptions, are the bad guys.

The book starts out with a brutal murder scene where all members of a family are slaughtered in their sleep, except for a baby who wanders out of the house and down the street before the murderer can find him. The baby ends up in a graveyard and curls up in the lap of a ghost mama. The murderer tracks the baby to this gothic site but is greeted by another dark figure who directs him to look in a different direction.

The baby is adopted by all the ghosts of the graveyard and grows up learning how to be invisible, to walk through walls, and haunt people’s dreams. He goes through all the usual stages and misadventures of childhood and adolescence in this environment, without realizing how very different it is, while the murderer, of course, keeps trying to find him.

It alternates between page-turning suspense and improbable humor mixed with thought provoking  realizations of how much we take for granted during the first fifteen or so years of life. It is classified as fiction for young adults, but this grandmother, for one, found it hard to put down and thoroughly enjoyed it!