Fantasy is the genre most closely associated with author Neil Gaiman, and it’s a short step from there to the surprisingly cozy thriller and ghost story he tells in “The Graveyard Book.”
Like his celebrated novel and soon-to-be-movie “Coraline,” the story of a child kidnapped by her mother’s button-eyed doppelganger, “The Graveyard Book” is likely to mean one thing to young readers, and quite another to their parents. Indeed, Gaiman’s agent was appalled after reading “Coraline” in manuscript, especially upon learning that Gaiman wrote it for his daughters.
“This isn’t a kids book,” she told Gaiman. “It scared the willies out of me.”
“Read it to your children,” said Gaiman, who had read “Coraline” to his rapt 7-year-old daughter.
Somewhat mistrustfully, she did, and was dumbfounded when they loved it.
“That’s when we realized it was a book that adults read as horror and children read as adventure,” Gaiman said.
“The Graveyard Book” owes a small debt to Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” echoing the tale of a small boy raised by a nonhuman community. Kipling’s Mowgli is a man-cub raised by wolves and befriended by a bear, while Gaiman’s toddler is brought up by an even more improbable community.
“I think I was much nastier,” Gaiman said in a telephone interview. He will be at Unity of Boulder Church, 2855 Folsom Ave. in Boulder to read and sign his books at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.
“I was inspired by Kipling. ‘The Jungle Book’ began with Shere Khan, the tiger, having killed Mowgli’s family, and he figures Mowgli is his, as well. I thought, ‘Well, there’s a beginning!’ It’s absolutely horrifying and also establishes the ground rules right there. I wanted a book set in a graveyard. I love the idea of a small boy who is adopted by dead people and taught the things that dead people know. But I needed a damn good reason to keep him in the graveyard.”
So he traded the killer tiger for a vicious assassin who does away with everyone in the family but the toddler who fortuitously escapes from his crib and makes his way to a nearby graveyard. It’s quite a beginning, as indebted to Hitchcock (especially “Psycho”) as to Kipling.
“I did make a conscious decision that you don’t see anyone getting killed,” Gaiman pointed out.
“It happens just before the book starts, and it does establish that there really is danger, and you absolutely understand why the people in the graveyard are willing to take the boy in, and why they don’t want him wandering out in the world.”
Even if the bloody action begins off-stage, it remains staggeringly visual, a characteristic that marks Gaiman’s prolific ouevre of prose, poetry, film, song lyrics (including a collaboration with artists for the 2007 album “Where’s Neil When You Need Him?”), drama, comics and journalism.
“Pretty much everything I write comes with a picture track,” he said.
“Like, I know what things look like, and where things are. I’m describing imagery I see in my head. Writing comics definitely helped, but writing comics would have been difficult without that ability. I know a number of novelists, many better than me, who’ve tried writing film scripts or comics and failed. What they do so well has to do with the words, and you wind up with seven pages of two people talking to each other, or something that’s unfilmable. What’s nice about being me is it all sort of works in my head, and then I put it down on paper.”
Fiction
The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, $17.99
