The Graveyard Book

I really enjoyed this. Being a YA novel it's more Coraline than Sandman or American Gods, but Gaiman's YA novels are anything but infantile and there's a lot to like here.

A baby is the only survivor when his entire family is murdered by a mysterious assassin. The toddler somehow winds up in a graveyard, where he's adopted by the locals (ghosts, a vampire, various spirits), named "Nobody" (Bod for short) and raised by them as one of their own. At first, it's all rather sweet and harmless. But as he grows older, both his past and his future - he's a human boy, after all - start pulling him in a different direction from his family. They're dead, after all, and he has to learn what it means to live.

The obvious influence is Kipling's Jungle Book - it's so obvious that Gaiman even admits it - and since we know that story and others like it, the plot gets a bit predictable; but even then, Gaiman keeps my interest. Like Coraline it's a darker story than most writers would want to put a child in, which I like, but above all it's the world Gaiman creates around his characters. There's roots here, subtly reaching both into other stories and into the past, grounding the story in - or rather, just beside - the real world that we all live in and making the characters real with it. Gaiman borrows from others, but he borrows because he knows how the originals work and how he can make it work for him. Much like the central character, Nobody, learns to do; a name both fitting (no history, no human connections, no knowledge of how the world works) and increasingly ill-fitting as he learns and grows and pieces together his world.

"Someone killed my mother and my father and my sister."
"Yes. Someone did."
"A man?"
"A man."
"Which means," said Bod, "you’re asking the wrong question."
Silas raised an eyebrow. "How so?"
“Well,” said Bod. "If I go outside in the world, the question isn’t ‘who will keep me safe from him?’"
"No?"
"No. It’s ‘who will keep him safe from me?’"

And the answer, of course, is Nobody.