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.

Then another day driving, me with toys and books, reading, dreamy, lost in my interior world.

Finally, after a week of driving, we would arrive at the little house in Northern Vermont. It seemed like the ends of the earth to me, Starksboro, a poor hardscrabble farming town with no kids to play with — just a few gruff farmers and their rough and tumble families. The house we lived in for a few weeks each summer had no running water, no electricity, and at first no indoor plumbing. We cooked outside over a kind of grill made of granite stones from the field. When they bought the place in 1950 my parents had spent weeks shoveling old clothes and junk out of the house, and it still smelled like damp plaster when I was growing up. The extra room was piled high with National Geographics that my father must have saved. The icebox in the basement with the dirt floor had a block of ice in it and I was sure there were giant spiders lurking.

No one my age came to visit, I was by myself all day in the woods or the fields, building a tree house or later, when I was a teenager, shooting my .22 in target practice, or, once a woodchuck who was sunning himself on the rock down the hill. I went down to see if I had hit it, and saw a trail of blood down into the hole below the rock.

Then sometimes the Brooks family would come up from Connecticut, and then everything was filled with energy and excitement and we all sat at the big table outdoors in front of the house and cooked pancakes and hamburgers on the grill. Or we floated boats on the pond.

Sometimes my parents would take me with them to visit their friends on Lake Champlain, wildly wealthy people with famous paintings on the wall and family pictures in their living rooms in perfectly polished silver frames. Then we came back to our little house late, down a dirt road, and the house was dark and an owl screamed in the distance and I had a tiny blue tin kerosene lamp in my room and I huddled around it, terrified that the bogeyman was coming down the attic stairs into my room. Then I went to sleep in the dark spooky night and in the morning it was all new again, and the sun was shining and the grass was shining and it was all new and joyous and everything was right with the world.