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[4.5] Another finished in an unintentional sequence of morbidly titled short ebooks. (I'm slightly tempted to read Burial Rites to continue the theme, but the novel inside doesn't have the humour and irony of the others, and it's not that short anyway.) It may be May, but this weather *sounds* appropriately autumnal for reading such things.

Gaiman is just so good at what he does. Whilst I'm not sure I agree with the cover quote from Diana Wynne-Jones: "The best book Neil Gaiman has ever written", there are moments when it's a masterclass; the opening chapter, for instance: this must be how you write horror for pre-teens; this is how you make something superbly chilling and creepy without any gory details.

He has so many ideas, he can throw something away on half a chapter or a minor character when many authors would have constructed a whole book around it. It's a melange of allusion richer than the average Discworld book; none are essential to understanding the plot, so it would be enjoyable for the 8-12 reader who hasn't read lots of these other books without them having a sense of missing things, but it means the story has another level of fascination for the adult reader well-versed in classic fantasy. Like Potter, Nobody Owens is a Boy Who Lived, which may seem a little too obvious (more obvious than the Jungle Book / Wild Boy theme Gaiman was aiming for). But what about a different twist on the governess from Willoughby Chase, and she and her charge finding themselves in a Tolkienly-named and landscaped mini-adventure where some of the interior scenery sounds like a German Expressionist film set and the inhabitants bring to mind varieties of goblin from multiple universes? Or a seventeenth-century teenage witch who's also kind of Tiger Lily? An old graveyard allows the wrapping together in one setting of spirits from pre-Celtic to Victorian - the low-fantasy children's books from the 60s, 70s and 80s which I loved, likewise set in provincial England, rarely had such a span in one volume, and each subplot has just as much magic as any of those novels. Shortening the hero's name to Bod likewise evokes that era. Sometimes allusions scuttle about at word level, barely conscious; the author knows so much, it can't help end up in there somewhere: "...purple. Doctor Trefusis..." [my italics]. Half-recognised references to films and books of decades past constantly flit in the back of one's mind: like the hero's guardians, haunting yet comforting.

To the reader who's technically old enough to be a parent of the child characters, a few plot points seem unlikely, that relevant adults wouldn't have thought a situation dodgy much earlier - but kids' fantasy books need that sort of scenario to function. And I thought the background of the villain somewhat underdeveloped (and thereby damp-squibbish), although he's the perfect Gaimanesque mix of the derivative reworked into the original-oh-I-never-would-have-thought-of-that. Re-reads of kids' books often show we were happy to take a writer's word for the badness or goodness of something, and this lot could on that basis perhaps still seem majestically powerful.

May 2015