take a graveyard.' Bod goes on odd adventures: A young girl adopts the boy dressed in a winding sheet as her imaginary friend, and he's abducted by some hilarious and fairly disgusting ghouls. 'It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child,' says Silas. Though he lives among the dead, young Nobody Owens, nicknamed Bod, has his ghostly parents, an undead guardian called Silas and 300 ghosts to watch over him. Content to allow Gaiman's writing to create the characters, McKean gives us a world of comfortable, haunted ruins. Showing us the graveyard through the boy's eyes, he makes rows of lonely tombstones seem safe and homey.

The invention of immortal folk who readers feel they might like to kick back with may be this prolific, tousle-haired, ex-pat British author's contribution to world literature.ĭave McKean, an artist famous for comic-book and CD covers, provides excellent, off-kilter inkbrush illustrations. Among Gaiman's fans are Tori Amos, who sang the line, '.me and Neil'll be hanging out with the Dream King' on her breakout album, Little Earthquakes. (The latter is being made into a stop-action animated motion picture, with Dakota Fanning voicing the lead.) In the past, he's personified Death as a punk-rock chick and the Dream King as her brooding, self-conscious brother. Gaiman is the author of the ground-breaking (rocked-my-world) comic Sandman and the best-sellers Anansi Boys and Coraline.

Children as young as 9 will enjoy this sweet, funny and gentle tale adults will appreciate its deeper undertones. The premise for The Graveyard Book is macabre, but author Neil Gaiman has a strange ability to make otherworldly characters quaint - loveable, even - and the story is anything but grave. The night a mystical killer murders his family, a child toddles off into a graveyard, where he's adopted by a loving, even-keeled ghost couple. Nail Gaiman says that inspiration for The Graveyard Book struck 23 years ago, when he was watching his son ride a tricycle through a cemetery.

The graveyard book series