A dead fish, which turns out to have swallowed a Victorian sixpence, leads to an encounter with something alien, powerful, dangerous, though not entirely malign. There are three women living in a house at the end of a lane – Old Mrs Hempstock, Ginnie Hempstock, and Lettie, who owns an ocean which appears to be a duckpond, 'dark water spotted with duckweed and lily pads'. One of the pleasures of my own childhood reading was the resourcefulness of children left to fend for themselves – and the knowledge that the shape of the story meant that they would do so. One of the terrors of childhood is the realisation that parents are not necessarily strong or understanding. This event, still in the everyday world, is the beginning of a terrifying shift in the nature of things.

His parents have a lodger, an opal miner, who accidentally kills a kitten, and subsequently kills himself in the family car. The narrator of The Ocean at the End of the Lane starts his story with that feared disaster of childhood, the seventh birthday party to which no one came. Bod (full name Nobody Owens) is brought up by ghosts in a graveyard after the murder of his parents and sister. Coraline goes through a door into a house in every way replicating her own, inhabited by a copy of her mother with black button eyes. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, like Coraline and like The Graveyard Book, has a young central character – a resourceful and determined child – who finds his world transfigured by terror and strangeness.

Gaiman is a master of fear, and he understands the nature of fairytales, the relation between the writer, the reader and the character in the tale. O n the cover of Neil Gaiman's extraordinary tale, Coraline, is a quotation from Terry Pratchett, saying that the story has 'the delicate horror of the finest fairytales'.

The ocean at the end of the lane novel