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attackfishEver read a book with a trope you've read before and kind of liked and then realized everyone else was doing it wrong, because this book got it exactly right? That's what reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman was like. I'm not surprised, it was written by Neil Gaiman, and he managed to get me to like post modern short stories so I was really really excited that he had written something new in my genre. It lived up to and exceeded my expectations.
The novel starts out when a mysterious figure named Jack massacres a family, but while he's killing the others, the baby boy crawls away, out of the house, and into a nearby graveyard. The ghosts of the graveyard take him in, along with a craggy vampire named Silas and hide him from the eyes of the living. As the boy, now called Bod, short for Nobody, grows up, Silas and the ghosts teach him the usual things, human and ghostly, and meanwhile, he meets ghouls, a witch's ghost, a normal human girl, a Russian werewolf, an ancient man in wode and his strange and terrifying guardians, and when Silas allows him to go to school, the ordinary children of the village.
And he learns the value of being alive, even when the dead can walk. "If [he changes] the world, the world will change."
Neil Gaiman gets it all right, the ghouls, the vampire, the werewolf, the walking dead, and the orphaned baby prophesied to kill the evil doers.
When Jack finally tracks Bod down to finish off what he tried to do back when he was a baby, Bod and his only living friend find out that they're facing not one jack, but dozens, the Jacks of all Trades, hunting for him because he was prophesied to be the one to destroy their sinister global order. They think they have him cornered but he knows the graveyard better than they do...
There are of course, problems with the novel. Gaiman should have started the Bod vs. the Jacks sooner after Bod's family was killed. The way the near entirety of that conflict was shoved into the last quarter of the book with most of the rest dedicated to Bod's adventures in the graveyard felt very abrupt, and almost like it was an afterthought, and not the main conflict like it was supposed to be. It feels a bit too episodic. Also it lacks Gaiman's signature morbid humor, probably to make it gentler than his other novels, though it laks none of his creepiness. Still, it's so poignant and so philosophical, that I've reread it six times already.
Books like The Graveyard Book make me want to take my hands away from the keyboard and never write again because I'll never be able to write like that. Maybe I'll just do whar Bod wants to do instead. Seems like good advice:
"See the world, Get into trouble. Get out of trouble again. Visit jungles and volcanoes and deserts, and islands. And people. I want to meet an awful lot of people."
The novel starts out when a mysterious figure named Jack massacres a family, but while he's killing the others, the baby boy crawls away, out of the house, and into a nearby graveyard. The ghosts of the graveyard take him in, along with a craggy vampire named Silas and hide him from the eyes of the living. As the boy, now called Bod, short for Nobody, grows up, Silas and the ghosts teach him the usual things, human and ghostly, and meanwhile, he meets ghouls, a witch's ghost, a normal human girl, a Russian werewolf, an ancient man in wode and his strange and terrifying guardians, and when Silas allows him to go to school, the ordinary children of the village.
And he learns the value of being alive, even when the dead can walk. "If [he changes] the world, the world will change."
Neil Gaiman gets it all right, the ghouls, the vampire, the werewolf, the walking dead, and the orphaned baby prophesied to kill the evil doers.
When Jack finally tracks Bod down to finish off what he tried to do back when he was a baby, Bod and his only living friend find out that they're facing not one jack, but dozens, the Jacks of all Trades, hunting for him because he was prophesied to be the one to destroy their sinister global order. They think they have him cornered but he knows the graveyard better than they do...
There are of course, problems with the novel. Gaiman should have started the Bod vs. the Jacks sooner after Bod's family was killed. The way the near entirety of that conflict was shoved into the last quarter of the book with most of the rest dedicated to Bod's adventures in the graveyard felt very abrupt, and almost like it was an afterthought, and not the main conflict like it was supposed to be. It feels a bit too episodic. Also it lacks Gaiman's signature morbid humor, probably to make it gentler than his other novels, though it laks none of his creepiness. Still, it's so poignant and so philosophical, that I've reread it six times already.
Books like The Graveyard Book make me want to take my hands away from the keyboard and never write again because I'll never be able to write like that. Maybe I'll just do whar Bod wants to do instead. Seems like good advice:
"See the world, Get into trouble. Get out of trouble again. Visit jungles and volcanoes and deserts, and islands. And people. I want to meet an awful lot of people."
