Creepy, Crawly

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

Another book that Mallory has been telling me for months I should read--and again, she was right.  What an excellent little novel.  It's labeled Children's literature and even won the Newbury Medal.  But, like the best children's literature, it works well for adults too.  It is clever, very clever.  Indeed, I think I think I would rank it second only to The Sandman among the Gaiman books I have read so far.  At first blush it is just a creepy story of a kid who lives in a graveyard.  But, it is packed with clever twists and characters.  In Gaiman's fashion, there are all sorts of bizarre creatures---there is, as always, the Shadow world which only our Hero can see.  And the Shadow world in this case is fun--the ghosts of the people buried in the graveyard, but since the graveyard is very old and has of late been turned into a Nature Preserve, all the ghosts are from Olden Times.  And, in addition an array of fantastical creatures, whose nature is never stated, but gradually becomes apparent.  One of the main characters, for example, is a vampire, but he is never actually called a vampire in the whole book.  The story is episodic--Gaiman likens it (in a talk on the book included as an appendix) to The Jungle Book and the comparison is pretty accurate.  It also makes for an interesting comparison for Gaiman--100 years from now, will people still talk about Gaiman the way we talk about Kipling?  Or will he be lost to obscurity?  (Speaking of which, there is a great bit in the book about the ghost of a poet who was so angered about a bad review that to get revenge he posted a note all over town saying that he would never publish another poem, and he never did.  Instead, he had all his poems buried with him.  That way, when in the future people discovered how great he was, they would all lament that the rest of his poems were never published.  And then, when everyone was really sad about never being able to read all his work, it would be revealed that his poems were all in his casket and they would dig up the casket and discover the poems and rejoice.  When our hero asks the poet if they had dug up the poems yet, the poet replied that it hadn't happened yet, but there was still plenty of time.)  Gaiman's future status (to return to the point from before the parenthetical aside) an interesting puzzle.  I suspect the answer hinges on what people 100 years from now think about comic books--when your greatest work is a comic book, your reputation hinges on the perception of comics.  He also has at least two really good children's books (this one and Coraline).  But, his novels, while interesting and fun to read, are not going to make it into Great Book status.  So, 100 years from now, if he is going to have a reputation, it is going to be based on comics and children's lit.  I am not sure if he would be happy with that or not.

I would have hated this book when I was a kid, by the way.  When I was young, I was terrified of the dark.  Ghosts, vampires, etc. scared me a lot.  A lot.  I hated going to bed--the dark room really scared me.  And it didn't take much to scare me--there is a Gilligan's Island episode in which Gilligan has a dream and there is a vampire in it--that episode scared me a lot.  A lot.  I was also frightened by The Count on Sesame Street.  Really--I'm not kidding.  When I start thinking of all the things that scared me, it is a ridiculously long list.  So a book like this would have seriously frightened me.  I have still never watched a horror movie as a result of my childhood fears.  Every now and then, I think I should watch one just to get over the lingering sense of dread, but to date, I have never been able to convince myself to do so.  What interests me about this is that in real life I have no fear of the supernatural or the dark or anything like that.  And, I can't remember the last time I actually thought something in a movie was scary or frightening.  Yet I still have this part in the back of my brain that gets agitated at the idea of watching a scary movie.

So, The Graveyard Book is a children's story that I loved when I read it but only because I didn't read it when I was a child.

And, for a coda: the best Creepy song.