The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The Basics:

Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Author: Neil Gaiman

Publisher: HarperCollins (2013)

Pages: 192 (hardcover)

The Overview:

The middle-aged narrator returns to his hometown of Sussex to attend his father's funeral. When his adult responsibilities and heartache become overwhelming, he finds himself drawn to the little village in which he grew up, and ultimately the duck pond at the end of the lane by the Hempstock family farm. 

Sitting beside the pond, our protagonist is drawn back in his memory to a time when he was 7 years old, and a boarder at his family's home committed suicide at the end of the lane. From that point forth, his small town was visited by supernatural nuisances, including one monster who took human form and became his family's nanny, seducing the narrator's father and bringing violence into the home. 

Banding together with the youngest Hempstock, Lettie, who appeared eleven but must have been older than the young man could imagine, he strove to drive out this evil force. The Hempstocks, who he discovered were not human but whose classification he did not know, introduced him to a new world of possibilities. He was exposed to inexplicable wonders and beings, and in the end, everything that was "real" was called into question. 

Why I Read It:

Neil Gaiman wrote it.

Why You Should Read It:

Neil Gaiman wrote it. He wrote it with an abundance of subtlety, suspense, and sweetness. For good measure, he threw in his unique grasp of children's fears and viewpoints that made earlier works like Coraline and The Graveyard Book so captivating. 

I find that, as children, we think that our individual fears are exclusive to us, and when we become adults, we no longer discuss the now-trivial things that terrified us as children. As a result, we never necessarily realize how universal and basic some of these feelings are. 

When I was a kid, my room was in the lower story of my home, half of which was underground, and thus referred to as the basement. When I would have to go down to the dark basement to retrieve something from my room at night, I was always able to walk confidently into the dark. However, when I turned my back on the cavernous, empty basement and headed back towards the stairs, I always felt something creep up behind me at the last second, and I would take off like a bat out of hell up the stairs and to the safety of the well-lit upper story. It took me until college to learn that this was a not a behavior that was specific to me.

Gaiman understands what kids are afraid of. He mentions in this book that the protagonist (who is certainly dredged largely from Gaiman's own childhood) had discovered a wooden knob at his grandfather's home that, looked at a certain way, resembled a man crying out. I couldn't help but be reminded of the nights when I could not sleep because I would endlessly seek out faces in the wrinkles of the curtains in my childhood bedroom. 

The result of the author's effortless expression of childhood terror is a book that I found to be inexplicably frightening. I have read a lot of Gaiman's work, and this is the first to ever keep me up at night. This is not his most complex or lovable novel, but it is a nail-biter. It also happens to include a beautiful supernatural allegory of the natural disconnect between memories of our childhood and our adult view of the world, but I won't go any further into that so as not to be accused of spoiling. 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a quick read, and one that affected me at a very basic level, and it might just do the same to you. Honestly, it's worth reading just for the subtle beauty of the Epilogue. Highly recommend.