Probably I’m the last person to read this book, and all the reviews have been written, but I wanted to write about it anyway, it’s always worth writing about something that thrills you.

When I first picked up The Graveyard Book a year or so ago and read the first few pages, I have to admit I passed a superficial judgement on it: too violent, too dark, too creepy. A killer with a sharp knife searching for a baby? I put it down, determined to avoid it, even if it had won the Newbery award. Then a friend and I were talking about the book, and she said: “Don’t worry about that first scene, that’s the most violent thing in the whole book. The rest of it is wonderful."

So I bought it. Then it sat in a basket on our kitchen counter for months, challenging me to try it.

Finally I grabbed it and sat in bed reading. I got past the first scene! Baby wasn’t killed! Baby escaped, toddled up to...a graveyard! A creepy dark forbidding graveyard with an old metal grate. And suddenly...the baby is saved! By ghosts, shades of past souls. Engulfed in a mist, a miasma of ghostly caring and help.

I was captivated, entranced by Gaiman’s ability to surprise, turn a situation on its head, move form one point of view to another. The ghosts soon seem the most reassuring part of the book, the solid citizens of the world, the souls who never change, who Bod can depend on. And then goes deeper, into a pagan cave, then the world of ghouls, the Potter’s field at the edge of the cemetery. While Bod grows up the man Jack hangs at the back of our minds, a gnawing little fear that will someday reappear. But there are so many delights for us before the climax, not least of them the extraordinary chapter Danse Macabre; dreamlike, moving, and thrilling at the same time. With a surprise at the end of the Danse; all who participated have forgotten about it, had a veil pulled over their eyes, even the ghosts.

An extraordinary book.