The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Paperback, 181 pages

Published Dec. 21, 2014 by William Morrow.

ISBN:
978-0-06-225566-2
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OCLC Number:
1298316097

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(5 reviews)

A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. 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. 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. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly …

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Review of 'The Ocean at the End of the Lane' on 'Goodreads'

This was like reading Neverwhere again. Except the main character is a child not 30ish. And I'm 30 odd, not a child.

It pretty much hits all the beats of Gaiman story, but here the structure creaks and groans. He mixes Coraline with Neverwhere, with American Gods, all the elements are there, and none of them feel original, or interesting. The quirky mystery of the Hempstocks was just annoying rather than alluring.

The main character has no agency, he just gets thrown from event to event, and his big heroic moment has him literally sitting still for hours.

No, I didn't like this at all. It's so bad that it may have tainted the earlier, better Gaiman stories, and that makes me kinda sad...

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