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".
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