REVIEW: ‘The Graveyard Book’ Written by Neil Gaiman and Illustrated by Dave McKean

The Grave­yard Book (2008) by Neil Gaiman is a illus­trated children’s novel pub­lished in hard­cover by HarperCollins.

Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Grave­yard Book’ is directly inspired by Rud­yard Kipling’s ‘The Jun­gle Book.’ Just replace the wild ani­mals of the jun­gle with the ghosts in the grave­yard and what you have is a imag­i­na­tively fun story.

The story opens with a grisly mur­der of a fam­ily. By chance, the tod­dler and only sur­vivor hap­pens to take a mid­night stroll that leads him to the grave­yard up the street. The man Jack, real­iz­ing that his quarry has escaped, goes look­ing for him, with knife in hand.

The denizens of the grave­yard who real­ize what has hap­pened to the baby’s fam­ily, decide to inter­vene on the toddler’s behalf by run­ning the mur­derer off. The Owens fam­ily who had no chil­dren of their own while alive, decide to be the boy’s adopted par­ents. The grave­yard folk agree to pro­tect the newly orphaned baby and grant him sanc­tu­ary thereby giv­ing him the ‘the free­dom of the grave­yard’. Silas, who is a mys­te­ri­ous fel­low, is appointed as the baby’s guardian.

Nobody Owens who goes by “Bod” spends most of his for­ma­tive years call­ing the grave­yard home. As a liv­ing per­son, he is granted cer­tain pow­ers that is usu­ally reserved for the dead. Such as see­ing clearly in the dark. He can also fade, dreamwalk and go through inan­i­mate objects. He can also manip­u­late people’s emo­tions by mak­ing them feel fear or terror.

The grave­yard ghosts are bound by the land where their bones are interred so they are not allowed to leave the prop­erty. Only Silas is allowed to come and go as he is nei­ther dead nor alive. He pro­vides Bod with his meals and his clothes. As for Bod’s lessons, he is taught by the peo­ple in the grave­yard. Silas is the only one to pro­vide him with infor­ma­tion that is cur­rent and the two grow to be very close.

Much of the story fol­lows Bod and the story spans about 15 years. We watch him grow up and make mis­takes along the way. Bod is a young kid who is inquis­i­tive and curi­ous. He is chival­rous, heroic and clever. I liked Bod a lot. The only liv­ing friend he has out­side of the grave­yard is a young girl named Scar­lett Perkins who he met when he was five. The two grow up briefly together but then they are sep­a­rated when Scarlett’s fam­ily moves to Scot­land. They meet up again some ten years later.

Bod has many mis­ad­ven­tures. He is taught about the bad things that he should avoid in the world of dead by Mrs. Lupescu. She teaches Bod about ghouls, ghoul-gates, Night-Gaunts and Ghluheim. Of course we run into the ghouls, who trick Bod into vis­it­ing their world. That part of the story made me read pretty fast and pro­vided a spot of humor and some sus­pense­ful moments.

There’s plenty of eerie places in the grave­yard to gen­er­ate a chilly atmos­phere for sus­pense. For starter’s, there’s the for­bid­den part of the grave­yard that Bod is never to visit called Potter’s Field, where a witch is sup­posed to be buried. And last but not least, there’s a mau­soleum that houses a inde­scrib­able crea­ture that turns the hair white of greedy mor­tal men, who dare to par­take of the trea­sure they find there.

Aside from Bod’s extra­or­di­nary child­hood, there is the mys­tery sur­round­ing the mur­der of his par­ents. We learn that the vil­lain is still look­ing for him some 15 years later and he uses arti­fice to ensnare our hero, too. The motive behind the death of Bod’s fam­ily has to do with proph­esy. Noth­ing sur­pris­ing there.

Despite the pre­dictable end­ing, I was still heav­ily invested in the res­o­lu­tion. I’d grown close to Bod despite the short length of this story. The end­ing had me feel­ing appre­hen­sive for him as he is thrust out to finally live his life among the liv­ing. I felt like a mother, let­ting her son go out into the world and hop­ing all will be well. The story incor­po­rates impor­tant themes that included but are not lim­ited to liv­ing life to the fullest, learn­ing from your mis­takes and assert­ing courage and self confidence.

This is a children’s story but it does have cross-over appeal. There are glow­ing five star reviews but I can’t say that I loved this book as much as they did. There were some slow spots and I did put this book down more than once. It’s not a com­pul­sively read­able book to me but enter­tain­ing nonethe­less. Also, there is much of the plot that I didn’t men­tion if you so choose to read this book; there are hid­den mys­ter­ies and sur­prises in store for you as well.

In a strange way, I liked that the story was set in a grave­yard. The ghosts who encom­passed the grave­yard made this story an inter­est­ing one. More than a few char­ac­ters were intro­duced with the year of their death fol­lowed by the writ­ing of their head­stones in paren­the­sis. The grave­yard is more of a nat­ural per­se­vere with peo­ple buried there from the time of the Druids.

I liked that Silas was mys­te­ri­ous and he was by far the most inter­est­ing char­ac­ter for me. I liked how the hid­den tal­ents of the char­ac­ters were revealed in order to be a sur­prise; oth­ers remained some­what elu­sive. You didn’t know who was what in here. The author gen­er­ated plenty of sus­pense and intrigue in sec­tions that had me quickly turn­ing pages.

In the end, how­ever, this is Bod’s story. After an extra­or­di­nary begin­ning, where does his life lead him to next? I hope we get an answer to that. Any­way, I finally read my first Neil Gaiman book. I look for­ward to read­ing more. There’s very lit­tle vio­lence or gore in here but there are a few scary moments. The tar­geted age group is 9 to 12. This is a very imag­i­na­tive story with a few scat­tered illus­tra­tions that ren­dered ok in ebook. A good read over­all. B.

This book is avail­able in ebook at Fic­tion­wise and Kin­dle.

For Fur­ther Reading

• What­ever Hap­pened to the Caped Cru­sader? by Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert
• Mon­day News
• REVIEW: ‘Cora­line’ Writ­ten by Neil Gaiman and Illus­trated by Dave McKean
• Neil Gaiman’s ‘Grave­yard’ Tells The Story of a Boy Raised By the Dead
• REVIEW: End of Days: Pre­dic­tions and Prophe­cies About the End of the World by Sylvia Browne and Lind­say Harrison
• REVIEW: The Eter­nals by Neil Gaiman, Illust. by John Romita Jr
• REVIEW: Pre­ludes and Noc­turnes by Neil Gaiman