I will never love Neil Gaiman as much as his fans do.
I have been sorely disappointed by Coraline and The Graveyard Book, while feeling only moderately enchanted with American Gods and Stardust.
Perhaps fantasy is just not the genre for me.
But, I will be the first to acknowledge the way that he "gets" the terrors of childhood. In reading this book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I was immediately pulled into the uncertainty of childhood with its unknown horrors lurking behind almost every shadow.
Worst of all is the powerlessness the child feels at the hands of the adults around him.
May there be a larger proportion of the Hempstock women's kindness in all of our lives, than the evil residing in the likes of Ursula Monkton.
Neil, you have finally written a book which wholly absorbed me.
