Like Pixar movies, Gaiman’s tales tend to de-construct genres no matter which genre the story happens to be in. Like Pixar movies, Gaiman’s books also tend to sell well.
That’s not to say that Gaiman is mainstream; Gaiman’s career was more or less built on twisting stories of all kinds. Likewise, this story follows the same route of playing with the ‘returning home’ trope. Told in first-person by an unnamed male protagonist, we follow his memory as he reflects back through time to his childhood. All wasn’t necessarily well at home; to maintain the property, his parents took in lodgers, renting out his room and forcing him to share with his sister. When one lodger turns up dead, that’s when our hero meets Lettie Hempstock. Lettie and her mother and grandmother, who live down at the end of the lane, are more than meets the eye. They can snip things out of history, and see monsters for what they really are. When our hero’s new governess Ursula Monkton starts her own little crusade against him, it’s up to him and Lettie to stop her.
While this book is written from a child’s point of view, it contains disturbing imagery, nudity, child abuse, and discussions of corporal punishment… that is, frankly, par for the course in any book by Gaiman. It feels like a callback to when everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, with deceptively innocent things could taken as terrifying monsters in another view. There’s a lot of adult fear narrated in beautiful prose, as well as nostalgia, and occasionally our hero goes off on tangents as he chases the fantastic memory that happened once, washed grey by time. Fun to read? Not really. Yet, evocative? Certainly.