Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book

[silverflight8]

Nobody Owens is an ordinary boy living in a graveyard. On one night years ago, a toddler is taken in by the denizens of the graveyard after having narrowly escaped murder; all his family is killed. That night, he is given the right to live in the graveyard and granted certain ghostly tricks - such as the ability to Fade and not be seen, to see in the dark, and so on. The Owens couple, dead hundreds of years, adopt and take care of Bod as he grows up, because the killer of his family is still out there. The book mostly follows Bod's adventures.

It's a children's book, and illustrated; I picked this up because I'd heard so much about it, albeit years ago, and ventured at last to see what the book was about. The illustrations were surprisingly lovely and scary - all that dark ink around where they were talking about the serial killer actually freaked me out - but it's ultimately a very short, small book. With the exception of the murderer, the events are bound together by Bod's life, nothing more. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the various interactions between Bod and the graveyard, the way that characters were introduced first by their grave etchings and then by personality.