Gaiman's New Book Depresses, Pleases, As Usual

A book that captivates the loneliness and helplessness of childhood, The Ocean At the End of the Lane is a short taste of the Neil Gaiman we all know, love and secretly envy.

Jamie Lynn Kerner's designs are just as
beautiful and haunting as the story.

Initially began as a novella for his wife, singer “Amanda Fucking Palmer” of the Dresden Dolls, it evolved into a short novel.

The story is based around an unnamed narrator who returns to his hometown and suddenly begins to remember a traumatic, supernatural childhood incident that happened to him at age 7. The story, in typical Gaiman fashion, involves a person from a boring life accidently gaining access to a hidden, magical dimension.

The story itself unravels slowly in a peaceful, tense and mourning fashion. The rural setting is just as lonely as the seven year old boy, running from strange, malicious, magical beings. This is the part of the novel that will stay with me, the reminder of how helpless and lonely childhood could be.  To children the fantastical is much more real and dangerous than the cloudy, far away, adult world.

Many descriptive moments in the novel made me very uncomfortable because they were so specifically gross, particularly one part where the protagonist removes a living being from inside of his body with stainless steel tweezers. The way Gaiman describes a lot of scenes are very vivid and haunting, and I still cringe thinking about them days later, goose bumps on my arms.

At 181 pages the main issue I had with the book is the lack of explanation of whatever mystical dimension is involved in this particular Gaiman plot, the reader does not get a lot of detail and I felt a yearning to know more and to understand more about what the danger truly was.

However, it is fascinating that Gaiman has revisited the Hempstick family, many of its members appear in his other works. Daisy Hempstock  is a character in Stardust and Liza Hempstock in The Graveyard Book. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Lettie Hempstock, of unclear relation to those two, protects the unnamed narrator from the trouble they both released onto the human world.

One of the most touching moment of the story is when the narrator chooses to remember something unpleasant rather than have the memory removed. “I want to remember…because it happened to me. And I’m still me,” reasons the seven year old in a moving moment of maturity and clarity.

Memory is a large focus of the novel, with the adult narrator in shock of how he could have possibly forgotten the most exciting memories of his life. It is that idea that will bring you back to mourning your childhood, and wondering what forgotten adventures you yourself have lost.

                I don’t normally put my book reviews on here, I normally just leave that sort of thing for my Goodreads account. However, the Gaiman is one of my favorite authors and since its release on June 18th I’ve been waiting for the time and money to get my hands on it.