The Graveyard Book

I admit I'm a Neil Gaiman fan. I love the way he's able to use words that invoke. Not just tell a story, but invoke it. I was drawn into The Graveyard Book from the first sentence, "There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife." Adding in the illustration of just a pitch black page with the hand holding the knife immediately put me into the story.

The story is about Bod, who comes to the graveyard a baby and leaves a young man. Each chapter nearly stands alone as a short story where the conflict is appropriate to the age of the hero. I really enjoyed "The Witch's Headstone", "Danse Macabre" and "Nobody Owens' School Days" (although I do feel Bod learned the same "lesson" in both "The Witch's Headstone" and "Nobody Owens' School Days"). I liked how the ghosts had personalities in tune with the age in which they died and I liked how Gaiman lets his readers deduce what other horrors exist in the world without spelling it out. The hints are very broad, but they're still hints.

I got lost in The Graveyard Book. That's where I like to be when reading. The last chapter had me in tears from beginning to end because I, like Bod, wanted things to stay the same even when I knew they had to change.

I read Neil Gaiman's journal so it was interesting to see the book develop as he was writing it. He's said that Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book was an inspiration for this work. I've not read it, and now I feel I should. All in all, I give this book a 5.