None of Gaiman’s child protagonists are strictly him. There are pieces of him in Coraline, in Odd from Odd and the Frost Giants, and there is a bit of him in the Bod that finds quiet places in the graveyard to read his book undisturbed. But they are not him. The boy in The Ocean at the End of the Lane is as close to autobiography as Gaiman has got, and despite the main character being a seven-year-old boy, it is in no way a story for children.

It’s a novel that started as a short story in 2011, written for his new wife, Amanda Palmer, simply because she wanted to know what he was like as a boy, and it was finished because he was half a world away and missing her. Gaiman summoned the voice of his younger self and stirred up memories of his boyhood home in Sussex for a short story that accidentally became a novel that nobody was waiting for and nobody was expecting. ‘‘It was an old manor which had been split into two, and had four or five acres, maybe 10. That house and garden for me were a complete wonderland. I don’t know what the guys who were there before us did, but we’d find these strange things in the attic like blocks of marble and bulbs with mercury in. We’d get the mercury out and play with it, and eat it’’ (Comics Forum #1, 1992).

Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman during the filming of Who Killed Amanda Palmer. Credit:Kyle Cassidy

The Ocean at the End of the Lane wasn’t even called The Ocean at the End of the Lane until about an hour before Gaiman emailed the final draft to his publishers. It had been Lettie Hempstock’s Ocean and to Neil and those friends who received early, unsure drafts in their inboxes it will always remain so. It’s dark and haunting and fits into that same corner of fractured memory as Violent Cases and Mr. Punch.



It is such a weird book because it’s the same kind of animal that Violent Cases is, and that Mr. Punch is, and that ‘‘How to Talk to Girls at Parties’’ is, even the bits of ‘‘Troll Bridge’’ are, in that the narrative character is absolutely playing fast and loose with my memories and my identity, and he’s kind of me except when he’s not. And in the case of Lettie Hempstock, I really tried very hard to kind of make him as me as I possibly, possibly could. He came out of conversations with Amanda because she just wanted to know, so I said, ‘I will make you something. I will show you. I was like this kid.’



When people asked about Violent Cases, I would say it’s like a mosaic in which every red square is true. But the red squares aren’t the picture. And in Lettie it’s even weirder. Because it’s like: that’s true, that’s emotionally true, and that’s a complete lie, that’s fictional. And then there’s an awful lot of me moving things around to get them to work, and me having to sort of go back to being seven again to write it, in my head, and walking around the house that’s been knocked down for the best part of 40 years.



I had a wonderful conversation with my younger sister Lizzie, who’d read it, where I had to apologise to her that she doesn’t exist in it, because fictionally she couldn’t exist in this thing. I couldn’t have her. A two-year-old threw everything off, because I would have had to deal with her and account for her at all times. And I was trying to explain that it’s absolutely true except whenever it’s not.



It begins with a narrator remembering 40 years ago when a South African lodger stole the family’s car and gassed himself inside it. Somehow the act dislodged something in the structure of the world, and strange powers are set loose in the quiet green countryside of England. We see everything through the eyes of the boy, who is never named and is at the center of the horror, and who has no one to save him but the three Hempstock women who live in a ramshackle farm at the end of the lane. This is the same family to whom Daisy Hempstock of Stardust belonged and Liza Hempstock from The Graveyard Book. ‘‘I had this idea about the Hempstocks who have lived at the end of the lane since the Norman conquest,’’ says Neil. But he hasn’t written the Hempstock story yet. He borrows characters for other things occasionally – they are some of the oldest characters in his head.

‘‘I wrote the first 5000 words. We got up to the point where the kid and Lettie had gone out and met this big ragged thing. And in my head it was a short story and all that was going to happen was they were going to go and see this big ragged thing and say, ‘Stop doing that,’ and it would, and that was that. And when I got to the big ragged thing I went, This isn’t how this thing ends. This is the beginning. And I apologised to the nice editor, Jonathan Strahan, in Australia, whom I was writing it for, and sent him a poem instead. And then it just sat there in the notebook.’’