Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a perfectly normal boy. Well, he would be perfectly normal if he didn't live in a graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the world of the dead.
There are dangers and adventures for Bod in the graveyard: the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer; a gravestone entrance to a desert that leads to the city of ghouls; friendship with a witch, and so much more.
But it is in the land of the living that real danger lurks, for it is there that the man Jack lives and he has already killed Bod's family.
First published in the UK at the end of 2008, The Graveyard Book has won the UK's Booktrust Prize for Teenage Fiction and the Newbery Medal, the highest honor given in US children's literature, as well as the Locus Young Adult Award and the Hugo Best Novel Prize. The awarding of the 2010 UK CILIP Carnegie Medal makes Gaiman the first author ever to win both the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal with the same book. The Graveyard Book, with its illustrations by Chris Riddell, was also shortlisted for the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration -- the first time a book has made both Medal shortlists in 30 years.
The Graveyard Book follows the format of a classic bildungsroman—it’s a coming-of-age story that focuses on the education and maturation of its young protagonist, Nobody Owens, who goes by the nickname “Bod.” When Bod is a toddler, a mysterious man named Jack murders Bod’s parents and older sister but is unable to find the elusive toddler. When Bod wanders into the nearby graveyard, the ghosts who inhabit it—along with the resident vampire, Silas—decide to raise Bod as their own to protect him from Jack. As Bod grows up over the course of the novel, he becomes increasingly interested about himself and how he fits into the graveyard community. With this, the novel suggests that developing a healthy community and friendships are crucial to the coming-of-age process. It’s those connections that shape a person’s identity and give them insight into who they are and how they fit into the world.
The novel insists that as children grow, they gradually become more connected to their communities. Bod is curious about his community from the moment he learns to talk, so Silas sets about teaching Bod to read the headstones in the graveyard. Through this, Bod is able to learn who’s who and how everyone—including him—is connected as part of the community. And as he grows, many of these ghosts become his teachers, instructing him in cursive, manners, and science, in addition to ghostly skills like Fading (disappearing) and Haunting. The werewolf Miss Lupescu, meanwhile, visits yearly to offer language lessons to Bod. With the help of these teachers, Bod integrates into the graveyard community while also developing the skills he’ll need one day as an adult in the world of the living.
While cultivating a rich, diverse community is important to a child’s coming-of-age process, the novel also suggests that what’s even more important is that children form friendships with other kids their age. This helps children develop empathy, compassion, and responsibility to others. When Bod is about eight years old, he strikes up a friendship with a ghost named Liza. In life, Liza was believed to be a witch, so the villagers buried her in the Potter’s Fields (unconsecrated ground reserved for criminals) rather than in the graveyard. Because of this, Liza wasn’t given the respect of a headstone to mark her resting place, which is upsetting for her. Putting himself in Liza’s shoes, Bod agrees that this is indeed unfair, so he sets out to buy a headstone for her—even though he’s not supposed to leave the graveyard and is risking his safety in doing so. While it’s possible to argue that Bod’s choice to defy his caregivers and put himself in danger by leaving the graveyard is indicative of his immaturity, Bod’s willingness to prioritize Liza’s needs over his own safety is a mark of his growing maturity. In this sense, Bod’s friendship with Liza shows him how to empathize and put someone else’s needs above his own—a crucial step in a child’s transition from the natural self-centeredness of childhood to the maturity of adulthood.
In the same vein, Bod’s friendship with the mortal girl Scarlett helps him integrate into a new community—that of the living—using his growing ability to empathize with and prioritize others. When Bod is 14, his childhood friend Scarlett and her mother return to Bod’s village after spending 10 years in Scotland. Scarlett and her mother grow close with a man named Mr. Frost, who, unbeknownst to them, is actually Jack—the man who murdered Bod’s family and is still set on murdering Bod. When Jack briefly takes Scarlett hostage in an attempt to kill Bod, Bod understands that it’s his responsibility as Scarlett’s friend to save her: after all, if it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t be in this dangerous situation. Plus, none of the ghosts can do anything about Jack, while Silas (a vampire) and Miss Lupescu (a werewolf) are out of the country, the responsibility to save Scarlett falls to Bod alone. Saving her, then, represents Bod’s newfound independence and maturity—and his understanding that it’s his responsibility to care for others, even if it puts his own life in danger to do so.
As Bod nears adulthood, he also gets more curious about his origins—who he was and what life was like prior to living in the graveyard. But as he explores this, Bod learns that his roots aren’t as important to the coming-of-age process as acknowledging and appreciating everyone who shaped him along his path to adulthood. Bod’s quest to find out his birth name embodies this lesson. Years ago, Mrs. Owens wasn’t able to learn Bod’s name from the ghost of his birth mother, so the Owenses decided to name him “Nobody”—a name that Silas thought would protect Bod from Jack. But understandably, as Bod gets older, he becomes more curious about his past and in particular, what his birth name was. When Bod seeks it out for advice, the Sleer (an ancient creature in the graveyard) even confirms that Bod will know who he is when he learns his name. But when Jack offers to share Bod’s birth name in the moments before he plans to kill Bod, Bod realizes he already knows his true name: Nobody Owens. Accepting the name that his ghostly parents gave him and giving up on finding the name that his biological parents gave him symbolizes Bod’s understanding that it’s more important to honor and acknowledge the people (or ghosts) who nurtured him and guided him to adulthood than it is to search for his past. This allows Bod to leave the graveyard weeks later as a young adult, content in the knowledge of who he is. Coming of age, the novel suggests, means discovering one’s identity and one’s place in the community—but those things are, in many ways, one and the same. Bod’s mentors, guardians, and friends are precisely what shaped his identity and helped him make the leap from childhood to adulthood.
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Gaiman grew up in Sussex and attended Whitgift School in Croydon. Upon graduating, he worked as a freelance journalist before earning his first author credit for a paperback biography of the pop music group Duran Duran in 1984. While the subject matter was certainly not indicative of his later work, its success was, and the first printing sold out in a matter of days. It was about that time that he met artist Dave McKean, and the two collaborated on the graphic novel Violent Cases (1987). The work established them as rising stars in the comic world, and soon the two were noticed by publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. They submitted story and art treatments to DC Comics, and the result was Black Orchid (1988), a miniseries that helped establish the atmosphere for the DC renaissance of the late 1980s. Along with Alan Moore’s work on Watchmen (1986–87) and Swamp Thing (1983–87) and Frank Miller’s gritty interpretation of Batman in The Dark Knight Returns (1986), the success of Black Orchid showed that a market existed for dark mature stories written for an adult audience. That became even clearer with the launch of The Sandman in 1989.
The Sandman was a completely new kind of comic, and it became one of the flagship titles for Vertigo, a line of adult-themed horror and fantasy series launched by DC in 1993. While McKean stayed on as cover artist for the book’s entire run, a rotating series of interior artists helped flavour each individual story arc. In addition, the stories were unlike any previously seen in mainstream comics. The protagonist was Morpheus, the manifestation of the ability of sentient beings to dream. Like many other pantheons, the Endless—Morpheus’s siblings—were godlike beings with human foibles and drives. A typical story was so littered with literary allusions and historical references that Internet fan sites soon began offering detailed annotations of individual issues. By the time the series ended in 1996, The Sandman had captured an enviable list of awards and was DC Comics’ top-selling title. Gaiman also topped best-seller lists with his novels Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett, 1990), Neverwhere (1996), Stardust (1999; film 2007), and American Gods (2001) and with his children’s book Coraline (2002; film 2009). He revisited the Sandman characters in 2003 with Endless Nights, an anthology that had the distinction of being the first graphic novel to earn a place on The New York Times best-seller list for hardcover fiction.
In 2004 Gaiman penned 1602 for Marvel Comics. The story reinterpreted classic Marvel superheroes and marked Gaiman’s first foray into the superhero genre since his run on the critically acclaimed but legally troubled Marvelman (known in the United States as Miracleman) in the early 1990s. Fittingly, the proceeds from 1602, one of that year’s best-selling comics, were used to finance Gaiman’s ultimately successful effort to free Marvelman from the copyright issues that had entangled it since 1998. The following year he reunited with McKean for the visually stunning film MirrorMask, and they collaborated on The Wolves in the Walls, an illustrated horror story for children. Anansi Boys (2006) revisited some of the characters introduced in American Gods, and it debuted at the top of The New York Times best-seller list. InterWorld (2007; with Michael Reaves) was a young-adult novel centred on a teenager who can travel between different versions of Earth and must deal with magical forces seeking to control them. The story had initially been conceived as a television show but was never picked up. Two sequels, The Silver Dream (2013) and Eternity’s Wheel (2015), were conceptualized by Gaiman and Reaves and written by Reaves and his daughter Mallory.
In 2009 Gaiman received the Newbery Medal for his distinguished contribution to literature for children for The Graveyard Book (2008), the macabre yet sweet tale of an orphan raised by a cemetery full of ghosts. In the ostensibly adult novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), a man reflects on a series of supernatural traumas sustained during his childhood. One of Gaiman’s most personal works, it was voted Specsavers Book of the Year by readers in the United Kingdom. Gaiman returned to the Sandman mythos for the first time in a decade with The Sandman: Overture (2013–15), a lushly illustrated limited series that featured art by J.H. Williams III and a story that explored the events that took place prior to the first Sandman tale. Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (2015) was a collection of brief tales, many of which referenced or sprung from the work of other authors and artists. In 2017 Gaiman offered a novel interpretation of Norse myths in Norse Mythology, while Bryan Fuller and Michael Green brought a lush, critically acclaimed adaptation of American Gods to the Starz cable network. Gaiman later adapted Good Omens as a miniseries that premiered on Amazon in 2019.
Michael Ray
EB Editors
Inventive, chilling, and filled with wonder, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book reaches new heights in this stunning adaptation. Artists Kevin Nowlan, P. Craig Russell, Tony Harris, Scott Hampton, Galen Showman, Jill Thompson, and Stephen B. Scott lend their own signature styles to create an imaginatively diverse and yet cohesive interpretation of Neil Gaiman's luminous novel.
Volume One contains Chapter One through the Interlude, while Volume Two includes Chapter Six to the end.
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Both books are available through the library.
The English cemetery where most of the novel takes place offers insight into the history of England going back several thousand years. The novel often mentions barrow graves, or tumuli—underground burial sites built into hills—which became common in the Bronze Age (roughly 2900–800 BCE), when the pagan Celts inhabited the British Isles. Some British barrow graves, however, date back to the Neolithic era and are believed to have been constructed around 3600 BCE. The Romans (like Caius Pompeius in the novel) arrived in Britain in 55 BCE, and Christianity followed by the year 200 CE. The various figures buried in the graveyard (or their headstones) introduce readers to various aspects of British society, from the rise of the medieval guild system to Britain’s witch-hunts. The character Liza Hempstock, who was executed on charges of witchcraft, probably died in the early 1600s, just as Britain began to codify punishments for witchcraft. She was named after Queen Elizabeth I, who died in 1603—and it was only a few years before Liza’s birth that King James VI of Scotland published Daemonologie, which inspired many later witch-hunters and “experts” on the subject of witchcraft. Liza also died around the time the Black Plague began to die out in England, mostly thanks to concerted efforts on the part of the government. The Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, that appears throughout Chapter 5 (and is the title of the chapter) is an artistic allegory that arose in response to the Hundred Years’ War between France and Britain and the rise of the Black Plague in the mid 1400s. Images of the dance were often satirical and reminded viewers that everyone—no matter their station in life—would eventually die.
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