Book Recommendation: THE GRAVEYARD BOOK

When I was a child—especially during my third and fourth grade years—I loved ghost stories.  My best friend Jenny and I would tell each other the scariest stories we could dream up, trying to give each other goosebumps (even if we were sitting in the warm sunshine near the pool’s snack bar drinking orange soda and eating grilled cheese sandwiches).  We roamed the school library, searching for anything involving anything haunted.  And we loved graveyards.

I grew up in a small town on the north shore of Massachusetts, and so I was lucky.  Not only was Salem nearby—with its witches and cobwebbed history—but we had some old graveyards right in our town.  Jenny and I got it in our heads that we wanted nothing more than to camp overnight in a graveyard.  Preferably the oldest graveyard in town. Ideally on Halloween.  Upon hearing this request, my mother didn’t immediately forbid this venture.  Instead, she waited a little while—a while during which we made plans involving tents and chocolate bars and grave rubbings and such.  Then she gathered us to share the unfortunate news that it was illegal to camp in graveyards.  We were forced to abandon our plans, moving into new supernatural investigations.

I first heard about Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book from my nephew, a precocious reader and one of my favorite people with whom to talk about books.  When I asked him what it was about, he told me that it starts with the murder of a family in which one member—a toddler—escapes and is rescued by the ghosts of the graveyard.  I was hooked.  I knew that at some point I would have to read this book, and now that I have I’ve finally gotten my chance to spend the night in an old graveyard. 

And not just one night: the toddler who escapes death grows up in graveyard, learning the dangers of ghouls and the tricks for becoming invisible along with his ABCs.  Bod—short for Nobody—has parents and mentors and friends and guardians just like any other boy.  Except that all of these folks just happen to be dead.  This small detail doesn’t stop them from being funny and sweet and odd and difficult in turn.

In The Graveyard Book, Gaiman makes us believe every detail of Bod’s world.  Gaiman makes the impossible seem merely invisible, and in doing so, blurs the line between fantasy and reality.  One of my favorite passages occurs not long after Bod has made his first “live” friend, a little girl named Scarlett:

On the way home Scarlett told her mother about the boy called Nobody who lived in the graveyard and had played with her, and that night Scarlett’s mother mentioned it to Scarlett’s father, who said that he believed that imaginary friends were a common phenomenon at the age, and nothing at all to be concerned about, and that they were fortunate to have a nature reserve so near. (42)

Of course, five-year-old Scarlett is not making Bod up, just as Bod is not making up his graveyard friends and caretakers, though Scarlett—not having the Freedom of the Graveyard—cannot see them.  And upon hearing that Scarlett’s father, a teacher of particle physics, has dedicated his life to “things that’s smaller than atoms,” Bod decides that such a man is “probably interested in imaginary things” (44).  Who can argue with that kind of logic?

Each chapter of The Graveyard Book holds a little adventure, while the central tension—the man who would murder Bod is still after him, yet a boy can’t live in a graveyard forever—remains throughout.  The Graveyard Book is a novel that can be enjoyed and appreciated at any age, by anyone who enjoys a sometimes dark, sometimes funny, sometimes fantastical, sometimes tender book.  And certainly by anyone who believes that the impossible might just be the invisible in disguise.

[Gaiman, Neil. The Graveyard Book. New York: Harper, 2008.]