As Gaiman has said many times, his book was partly inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, in which the infant Mowgli was raised by wolves. The little tyke’s name is Nobody – Bod for short – and on page one his family has just been murdered by a particularly nasty villain (“The man called Jack”) with a sharp knife, and shoes polished like dark mirrors. It tells the story of an orphaned baby who has been rescued and raised by ghosts. Almost any child from age nine upwards into the mid teens would like The Graveyard Book though arguably, it isn’t written only – or even primarily – for that audience.
You don’t want this to feel like homework. It could pay to get to it while the book can still feel like a personal discovery – because once the promised major motion picture version kicks in, The Graveyard Book may start to feel like a cultural obligation, akin to seeing The Wire or having a firm opinion about The Tree of Life. Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book has been the only book ever to win both the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal, and all the critical huzzahs and word-of-mouth recommendations kept it in the New York Times children’s best seller list for over a year. It is a reviewer’s cliché, but if any recent book qualifies as an instant children’s classic, this could be it. Neil Gaiman’s brand of horror lite is aimed at parents, as much as kids
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