There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. pg 1

The man Jack wipes the blood off his knife as he walks up the stairs. He’s already killed the Mother, Father, and older sibling. Now he’s set to finish the job - an 18 month old toddler. However, because the man Jack left the front door open and woke the little boy- he has already toddled his way out and down the street to the old cemetery. Niel Gaiman’s deliciously macabre children’s book tells the tale of a boy who grows up in a cemetery and raised by ghosts. They name him Nobody Owens, or “Bod” for short.

The cemetery makes for fertile ground to prompt the reader profound questions on the nature of life, death, and friendship. A young Bod, unhappy that his ghostly parents forbid him from leaving the cemetery, asks them what’s the problem with being dead? They’re dead, aren’t they; and then he could be with them? This question caught me. In a world where the line between living and dead is so thin that a living boy can have ghosts for parents, what’s stopping him from dying or desiring death? The answer should have been obvious. We are static Bod, they explain. We have stopped growing and stopped doing. But not you. You have so many new stories to live out and growth to experience. Bod recalls that he doesn’t play with the youngest “residents” of the cemetery anymore. Children, and even adults, need friends who grow and change with you.

This leads me to my only real criticism with the book. His only living friend is a girl his own age whom he rarely sees, missing an opportunity to explore the changing nature of friendship. Her story ending was rather weak and the final confrontation with the man Jack felt like Gaiman was tying loose ends just for the sake of it and not because that’s where the story was leading.

I picked this up on a whim at my local library where a “Librarians’ Favorites” list featured it. I’m really glad I did, I loved this book. Gaiman’s writing, atmosphere, and setting was an autumnal feast, perfect for a Halloween read.