neil gaiman the ocean at the end of the lane

There's friendship and love, and cruelty and resentment. It’s true of everybody.”This story is an amalgam of helplessness and innocent ignorance of childhood with universe-old wisdom, with mystery and wonder and unexplainable and unfathomable and things that lurk around the corners of reality and seep through the cracks in the world. People are much more complicated than that. “Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark. And Lettie-magical, comforting, wise beyond her years-promised to protect him, no matter what.Ī groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.įorty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. 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. 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. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral.

Neil gaiman the ocean at the end of the lane