The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
I have know of Neil Gaiman a long time, as he was the first artists to use the Macintosh to create a graphic novel, back in the ancient days when I was studying illustration at Mass Art. Stood in line for a couple hours at the BEA when it was in Los Angeles to get him to sign Coraline when it came out.
His book that came out this October, of course, considering its genre, is The Graveyard Book. It’s a wonderful, kind of scary but ultimately very sweet story of a little boy whose family was murdered when he was just a toddler. He wanders out into the night as the evil man Jack searches for him, and toddles and crawls through the gates and into the neighboring cemetery. The residents of the cemetery, mostly ghosts of long-dead individuals come to a hasty decision to hide the child, as the ghost of his newly-dead mother passes by and implores them to protect her baby, before she fades away. An old childless couple Mister and Mistress Owens, dead for over 200 years, convince the others that they should protect and raise the child, and so they do, with the help of Silas, the only one who lives there that can leave the cemetery. He’s not a ghost, likely a vampire, but that’s never spelled out.
They name him Nobody Owens, Bod for short, and he grows and thrives in the shadows and among the shades, learning from everyone from the oldest among them, a Roman citizen, to Victorian schoolteachers, and the many children who died at early ages. He learns useful things, like Fading and Disappearing, and Dreamwalking as well as his letters, from the gravestones.
One day he encounters a little girl, whose family is now living in his former house, and their friendship eventually leads to his discovery by the evil Jack, which puts everything and everyone he has grown to love at risk.
It’s a wonderful book, just won a Newbury Award so I am not the only one who thinks so! It is full of creepy, scary things, and wonderful characters from throughout many time periods on the English countryside, and is just a great book. Very young children might be scared, but I doubt it. Really, I recommend it to anyone who loves a good scary story.