The Ocean at the End of the Lane

A rich, absorbing, fairy tale that definitely solidified Neil Gaiman as one of my favorite authors.

A middle-aged man returns to his hometown for a funeral when he finds himself drawn to the pond at the end of the lane, the pond on the old Hempstock farm. As he sits and looks at the pond, memories begin to bubble to the surface, memories of a terrifying sequence of events that occurred when he was seven years old. A chain of events that began when his family's tenant committed suicide.

Before reading this, my only novel length exposure to Gaiman has been American Gods. However, I was warned not to base my expectations for his work on that, as American Gods is a very different read from the sort of story he normally tells. And I definitely get that. The Ocean at the End of the Lane was a rich, whimsical tale of childhood and magic as undefinable and mystical as was ever told, every bit as dark but nowhere near as emphatic as American Gods.

At its heart, what made this book such an enthrallingly powerful read for me was how completely immersive it was. Gaiman's rich, incredible writing covers you like a nice cool blanket on a hot day, leaving you utterly satisfied to your core. It's a skill very few authors can manage, and one he seems to use with absolute ease. It was ridiculously easy to enjoy the exploits of our unnamed seven year old; from the moment the opal miner is found dead a sequence of events begins that is magical, terrifying but most of all powerful to experience.

Threaded through the book is an incredible portrayal of childhood and the vast gulf between it and adulthood; by the end I felt like being a young adult meant I had lost something, something primordially magical and so profound that my life would never quite recover from it. With an emotional punch more equatable to a battering ram than a fist, I don't think I'm going to be forgetting this book for a long time to come.

I consider this to be a modern fairy tale; the whimsically charming way in which Gaiman handles not only the main characters but the danger they face really brings to mind tales such as Hansel and Gretel. A typical example is when he waits in the faery ring for Lettie to return, the way the shadows paint a dark, accurate future of adulthood for him that culminates in him being sacrificed to anatomy [I absolutely loved the whole anatomy/boogieman dynamic].

For such a short book, the main reason I picked it to be the next Gaiman I tried, I never expected I would be getting a read with this amount of emotional weight behind it, but the magical quality was everything I signed up for an more. Very highly recommended; Gaiman is truly one of the best fantasy authors writing today. There's no doubt about that in my mind, at least.