The Graveyard Book

I am a huge fan of Neil Gaiman. A couple of years ago, I started reading his Sandman graphic novel series and subsequently explored Coraline, Anastasi Boys and last summer (and again this term), The Graveyard Book. Gaiman is one of those authors that is able to speak to both young and adult audiences with equal sincerity. When I initially read this book, I thought that it read a bit younger than the other young adult literature that we have read for this course, the protagonist’s age for most of the text notwithstanding, the stories and the content didn’t hold the same amount of emotional weight as other texts. This is of course ironically countered by the fact that the entire story is based within dark and violent contexts.

I enjoyed Bod and his community of ghosts. Though I wasn’t as emotionally connected to the text, I was an eager participant in his adventures. I especially enjoyed the characters Gaiman created on the blank canvas of an ancient graveyard. The endearing love of the Owens family, the witty charm of Mrs. Lupescu, and the chilling tenacity of Mr. Frost all work together to provide Bod an exciting context to understand life from the dead. I was saddened at the end when Bod began to outgrow his childhood home, he gradually lost his ability to see in the dark and the once open graves were now hard as stone. Just like we all must travel away from the comforts of the known (no matter how strange that known may be) to seek fortune in the broader world, Bod leaves his graveyard to find Life. Bod’s is a unique coming-of-age story about learning what is most important in life from those already dead.

From a critical perspective, keeping in mind Gaiman’s deep history with graphic novels, it is fascinating to examine his use of imagery in prose. There is a macabre elegance to his language throughout the text. The beginning of the book opens with a dark description of the man Jack murdering Bod’s family. “The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door”. While there are slight illustrations to provide visual depth to the beginning of each chapter, Gaiman is masterful in his attention to detail. The narrative brings to life dark underworlds, benevolent ghosts and evils buried long ago.

Later in the story, when ghouls capture Bod, Gaiman paints a terrific picture of a dead city. “It was a city that had been built just to be abandoned, in which all the fears and madnesses and revulsions of the creatures who built it were made into stone”. The reader can imagine the terrible feeling this place oozes out like clotting blood. Because Gaiman is creating pure fantasy, his must provide his readers with enough textual details to understand and appreciate his vision. Near the end of the book, Gaiman finally reveals the hidden sleer, “The faces were covered in purple patterns, tattooed in swirls of indigo, turning the dead faces into strange, expressive monstrous things”. This evokes the type of terrifying fascination with the truly strange that colors all of Gaiman’s writing. Adults have been lucky to have an author like Neil Gaiman who is both able to imagine these twisted places and bring them to life in such vivid detail for long enough, it is fantastic that he is sharing his talents with a younger audience.