THE GRAVEYARD BOOK
By Neil Gaiman, illustrated by
Dave McKean
HarperCollins/Paperback/312 pages/
$19.21 with GST/Major bookstores/ ****

You can always count on United States-based English author Neil Gaiman, the author of the acclaimed Sandman comics, to pen a humorous, haunting and utterly compelling story.

His latest children's novel, set in present-day England, opens chillingly with the brutal murder of a family - 'There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.'

All are killed except the youngest, a toddler. By accident he escapes, wandering into the nearby graveyard-turned-nature reserve where he is adopted by Mr and Mrs Owens, a kindly couple who happen to have been dead for the past few hundred years.

After an emergency meeting by the residents of the graveyard, who date from Roman to Victorian times, it is finally agreed that the boy can stay until he is old enough to fend for himself. Thus ensues the graveyard version of Rudyard Kipling's 1894 classic The Jungle Book (which Gaiman credits as a source of inspiration in the acknowledgments).

Named Nobody Owens, or Bod for short, the boy is mentored by the powerful Silas who, though it remains coyly unmentioned by the author, is almost certainly a vampire, as is hinted heavily throughout the novel - he is neither alive nor dead, comes out at night, has no reflection and 'consumed only one food'.

Despite taking place in the current day, the novel has a gothic sensibility - it is set in a graveyard, after all - with richly described scenes accompanied by dream-like black-and-white drawings by long-time Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean. Including epic battles and a literal danse macabre (dance of death), they will no doubt look stunning in the inevitable film adaptation.

The graveyard, strange as it may seem, serves easily as a metaphor for the trials and tribulations of childhood, without becoming overly didactic. Through various adventures with werewolves, witches and ghouls, Bod learns about friendship, justice and not to judge people by their appearance.

Meanwhile, he naturally feels a certain sense of loneliness as the only living - and thus, growing and changing - inhabitant of the place.

The ghost-reared lad also learns that what is truly scary are the people living outside the protective walls of the graveyard, as several expeditions out there prove, including a stint at a school.

Of course, things really get dire when, 10 years after the killings, the murderer comes back to finish the job.

It is true that certain elements of the novel are hackneyed - the young orphan who must defeat evil doers with the help of magical powers is a familiar trope - but the author infuses it with new life. The ending, while positive, avoids the happily-ever-

after of many children's stories, injecting a bitter note of realism into the fantasy.

Older readers will also enjoy certain sly digs that the author makes at various personalities and personality types. For example, he includes among the ranks of the unpleasant ghouls that Bod encounters at one point, the '33rd president of the United States' - to save you from looking it up, that is Harry Truman, not George W. Bush, who is the 43rd.

Most poignantly, one of the greatest lessons Bod learns is that he owes it to himself to discover what the wider world has to offer and to leave the sanctuary of his childhood home behind.

As Silas says to him: 'All the people here have had their lives, Bod, even if they were short ones. Now it's your turn. You need to live.'

Ghostly and corporeal set-piece battles aside, this is a story about growing up and learning to let go of the past in order to embrace the wonderful possibilities out there.

If you like this, read: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1909, $8.51 with GST, Books Kinokuniya). The lives of an orphan girl and those around her are transformed when she discovers a longhidden garden on her widowed uncle's estate.

ysteph@sph.com.sg

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Nov 2, 2008.