The story goes that it was a small cemetery near Gaiman’s house in the eighties, where he used to take his son to ride on his tricycle, that merged, in the author’s head, with The Jungle Book to produce the idea of a boy raised by ghosts. That’s why we have The Graveyard Book. Of course Gaiman’s son is now a grown man and The Graveyard Book has only been on release a few weeks. Why did it take so long?

Gaiman, explaining the situation both on his blog and at conventions around the world, has stated that he believed the idea was better than he could do justice to as a writer at the time. He tried. At numerous points over the years he had a go and we have at least two very good short stories as a result of those experiments - one of them forms chapter four of the actual text. Each time he was unhappy with the results and it was only his daughter’s insistence in knowing what else happened after he wrote The Witch’s Headstone (chapter four of The Graveyard Book) that he continued writing. Deciding that if he waited for himself to get “good enough” he’d never write it.

It’s a fair cop really because on the face of it The Graveyard Book shouldn’t work. A children’s book starting with a brutal murder, about a child raised by ghosts, riffing quite openly off Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and told in a series of short stories with a yawning two year gap between tales. It sounds a tough sell.

The structure is the key reason this book shouldn’t work. If short stories have one failing it is that their length makes it extremely hard to develop characters properly, that’s why they’re so hard to write well. In the structure Gaiman chose, one of the key challenges would’ve been to develop the central characters (Bod and Silas) to the point where readers felt they had read a novel rather than an anthology. A difficult task made harder given each story takes place two years apart (and Bod is a child, changing all the time).

Quite simply it shouldn’t work and yet: somehow it does.

The Graveyard Book is the story of Nobody Owens, rescued as a small child from the murderer whom has killed the rest of his family and subsequently brought up by the inhabitants of a near-by graveyard. From his ghostly parents to his undead guardian, through to ghouls and witches, we follow Bod as he grows up, learning the ways of the dead - and a few things about life - crashing headlong into adulthood and the inevitable confrontation with the man who killed his family.

If you read this book and all you get are ghosts, ghouls and witchcraft just go back and read it again. The plot is largely incidental, the book is about childhood, growing up and the importance of the people we meet along the way. Most importantly it’s about life.

As Gaiman notes in the acknowledgments, and I have mentioned a few times here, this book owes a lot to Kipling, and adults who have read The Jungle Book will enjoy the echo immensely, as I suspect will those (adult and child alike) who go on to read The Jungle Book for the first time as a result of reading The Graveyard Book. Ray Bradbury’s influence is also noticeable, particularly the excellent Something Wicked This Way Comes. And of course there’s a fair old whack of classic Neil Gaiman running through the whole mix providing a rich seam of dark humour, wryly drawn observation and wise understated lessons.

I’ve talked a little about the structure of the book and its potential pitfalls. I’ve also made the bold (and some would say rash) claim that it works but it would be unfair not to point out that it sails perilously close to failure in places, most noticeably with the jumping timeline. This is particularly the case with the transition from chapter five to six and it clunks a little – even given the interlude.

These judders seem to be produced from a desire to truthfully portray the transitions of a child as they grow up and you could argue that the change from nine to eleven is a pretty big one. I think for adult readers they really do work as a structural analogy for how fast the pace of change is in a child and how time flickers by but I wonder if children won’t find it takes them out of the story a little.

The characterisation of some of the supporting cast is less well done than the main characters and Bod’s adopted parents fall particularly foul of this in places. This may well come - if memory serves correctly - from The Jungle Book and the decision to focus on Bod’s mentors rather than his parents. It is after all a fair comment that a few well placed mentor’s can have a hugely profound impact on a child. Still, there were points were I thought Gaiman was going to wipe out (to use a totally inappropriate surfing metaphor).

I’m not a big one for spoilers (and I won’t be starting now) but it is worth noting that chapter eight lifts The Graveyard Book from good to great and shows Gaiman at his absolute best: funny, wise, sad, joyous and able to play the reader’s emotions like an accordion.

So overall what did I think?

That I liked this book should be quite clear. It is not without flaws largely as a result of the downside of using a short story structure but it is hard to see how the story could be told as effectively without the format chosen. It would be a different, duller, and probably bloated tale instead of the lean, bold tale it is.

For me – and somewhat irritatingly – Garth Nix puts it best on the dust jacket:

“I wish my younger self could have had the opportunity to read and reread this wonderful book, and my older self wishes that I had written it.” Garth Nix

Without question a must read.