The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is a ghost story for 10 year olds, and it opens with a toddler climbing out of his cot at exactly the right moment.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing what the right moment means, because it is the first thing that happens. A man called Jack is in the house with a knife. He has already used it on the mother, the father and the older sister. He goes up to the attic for the baby and finds a teddy bear in the cot instead.

The baby, meanwhile, has bumped down the stairs on his bottom, lost his nappy on the way, found the front door open and tottered up the hill in the fog to the old graveyard.

None of it is described in detail on the page. But it is the opening of the book, there is no warning and no soft landing afterwards, and a man is hunting a baby with a knife for a good while before anything stops him. A child who takes that sort of thing to bed with them will take this.

What happens next turns it into a different sort of book altogether. Mrs Owens, who has been dead for a couple of hundred years and never had a child, picks the boy up. His mother's ghost arrives in a panic and asks her to protect him. Mrs Owens says yes, which is very much easier said than done, because ten thousand souls live in that graveyard and most of them think a living boy has no business there.

Then a tall stranger meets Jack at the gate, walks him out, and talks him gently into forgetting he was ever there.

The graveyard committee argue it out in the moonlight while the baby sleeps in Mrs Owens's lap. Somebody suggests giving him the Freedom of the Graveyard. Nobody has ever done that for a living person before.

The way it reads is the odd bit. The prose is calm and old-fashioned and rather beautiful, and it says terrible things in the same voice it uses for a fox in the grass. That steadiness is what makes it bearable, and for the right reader it is also what makes it thrilling.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who can take a story that is genuinely frightening and never cheap about it, Gaiman's Coraline will suit them too. Coraline finds a door in a new flat, goes through, and discovers a mother on the other side who wants her to stay.