The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
William Morrow and Company - June 18, 2013
192 pages

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. It is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

A lot of the people who have been giving this book bad reviews say that it is just a puffed-up short story that was "expanded" by the author just to illicit more money out of his readers. My complaints are different.

I like Neil Gaiman, I really do: I like Coraline and The Sandman and The Last Temptation, a sort of comic collaboration with Alice Cooper and Michael Zulli. I think he's a great author. This one I wouldn't recommend to a Gaiman beginner who wanted to see how he writes (much as I probably wouldn't recommend The Dead Zone to a Stephen King beginner).

Gaiman tries much too hard in this one to be confusing in a good way, where you're not always supposed to understand what's going on, but you still read it because it's fun to go along. This wasn't the case. There are so many layers of nonsense and craziness that it's impossible to find anything fun in it.

The characters are all pretty lackluster; Gaiman decided it would be "edgy" not to give his protagonist a name, which has already been done in Fight Club, Invisible Man, and Rebecca. I swear, if this were a normal-sized book, I probably wouldn't have gotten through it.

Grade: D