![]() ![]() ![]() Gaiman never cheats his reader on account of the age of his genre’s intended audience although readers never see blood spilled, the violence is palpable, and the stomach turns when the implications of the wet blade and handle are revealed. The text starts: “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” This hand kills the mother, father, and daughter of the Dorian family, who do not factor into the story beyond the opening scene. “The Graveyard Book” begins, as many stories do, with a murder. Gaiman, then, spins us a wonderfully macabre story, not of a boy becoming a man, but of a boy being a boy, with all the transformations such a dynamic state entails. When Bod (more on that name in a minute) leaves the graveyard in which he is raised at the novel’s end, he is still very much a child. I will not invoke the terms maturation or coming-of-age, because the book offers no resolution for the character of the protagonist. Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book” is the ultimate fairy tale, not simply because it evokes and pays homage to all its literary and folkloric predecessors, but because it portrays the simple truth of growing up. ![]()
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