The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

The Newbery Medal is given out each year to the book that represents the most distinguished contribution to children’s literature. When I was a kid I read many of the books that won the award, but Neil Gaiman’s THE GRAVEYARD BOOK is the first one I’ve read in a long time, maybe several decades. I’d be willing to bet, too, that it’s the only Newbery-winning novel that opens with a cold-blooded killer slaughtering a married couple and their seven-year-old daughter in their beds. The only one who escapes is the youngest child, a toddler who has escaped from his crib and wandered out of the house while the killer was tending to the rest of the family.

That toddler winds up in a nearby abandoned graveyard, which is populated by the ghosts of several hundred people who are buried there, going all the way back to a Roman who lived in Britain when it was part of the Roman Empire. The ghosts decide to take the child in and raise him, and he’s given the name Nobody Owens, which is soon shortened to Bod. They’re able to care for a live human being because a vampire named Silas also lives in the graveyard and can venture out of it to bring back food, clothing, and whatever else Bod needs. (Gaiman never uses the word “vampire”, but it’s pretty obvious that’s what Silas is.) The rest of the book follows Bod’s life as he grows up in the graveyard, an odd, adventurous existence between the world of the dead and the world of the living. The story is fairly episodic, touching on different years in Bod’s life, but running all the way through it is a sinister undercurrent, because the man who murdered Bod’s family still wants to find him and kill him, too.

Steve Savile, an author friend of mine, recommended this book in an email group we both belong to, and I’m glad he did. Gaiman writes very well and manages to be funny and creepy and dramatic, often at the same time. There are a lot of striking images and well-drawn characters (living and dead) in this novel, and the final third of the book is very suspenseful and really had me turning the pages. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, Gaiman is one of those authors I’ve meant to read, but just hadn’t gotten around to it. Even though it’s early yet, THE GRAVEYARD BOOK is the best book I’ve read so far this year, and I suspect I’ll be reading something else by Gaiman before too much longer.