The Graveyard Book

If you have a young person on your Christmas list who is partial to the macabre--I'm thinking of Wednesday Addams--you would do well to purchase for them Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, a ghoulish update of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. I should caution that it's not for all children, particularly the very small, who might blanch at the opening chapter, in which a mother, father and daughter are knifed to death by a sinister murderer, and the baby boy escapes and finds sanctuary in a cemetery. As he grows, the assassin continues to hunt for him.

He is named Nobody Owens, and he is adopted by the ghosts of the large, ancient graveyard. A taciturn figure, Silas, who is hinted at being a vampire, becomes his guardian, bringing him food, but otherwise "Bod" as he is called is warned never to leave the grounds of the cemetery.

The story becomes episodic in nature, covering Bod as he learns the tricks of ghosts, such as fading and haunting (which comes in handy when he attends public school and has a run-in with bullies), discovers what ghoul-gates are, makes a friend of a young woman who was drowned and burned for being a witch, and witnesses the eerie danse macabre between the living and the dead. Gaiman excellently gives us a sense of place, as Bod explores and learns the grounds of the graveyard, which dates back to pre-Roman England. I will never visit a cemetery again without thinking of this book. The ghosts, who care for him, are the good guys here, while the living are not to be trusted.

I haven't had too much exposure to Gaiman. I never read any of The Sandman comic books, but I did read the adult novel American Gods and saw and enjoyed the film versions of Coraline and Stardust. There are certain parallels to other giants of young adult literature, namely the Harry Potter series, in that Bod learns the ways, rules and arcana of the dead. A pagan burial mound has a guardian, the Sleer, that is a touch Rowling-like. However, whereas Rowling took seven books of Yellow Pages length to tell her tale, Gaiman gets Bod to manhood in just over 300 brisk pages. He jumps into a scene that has Silas, a werewolf, and a winged mummy holding a pig in a cave beneath Krakow. We have no idea why they're there, or who they are battling, at least until the end of the book, and I kind of enjoyed the sense of wonderment that might have been lost had he spent three-hundred pages setting it up.

I see on Wikipedia that Neil Jordan owns the film rights to The Graveyard book (he also is supposed to be making another horror favorite of mine, Heart-Shaped Box) which is fine, but this book screams to be made into a film by Tim Burton. I was picturing Burton's stylistic tendencies as I read it.