Tales From The Crypt: Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book

When international best-selling author Neil Gaiman was inspired to write his acclaimed children's novel The Graveyard Book he had a very fixed idea of what he wanted it to be. It took 20 years for it to be exactly the book he felt it deserved to be and it went on to become cited by some as the best book Neil Gaiman has ever written.


Just before The Graveyard Book was released I was given, what I felt was, a dream job as contributor of the marvelous literary magazine Verbal, which was based in Derry in Northern Ireland. I had, until then, mostly worked as a music journalist but the biggest passion of my life had always been books so getting to write about them and speak to inspirational authors couldn't have been more exciting for me.

The Best of Neil Gaiman

The first ever book Neil Gaiman published was an autobiography of Duran Duran in 1984. Since then, the innovative author moved on to bigger and better things and spent most of the eighties writing graphic novels, most notably the renowned Sandman series. It was through a collaboration with Terry Pratchett that Gaiman started writing novels and ever since his work, although technically deemed fantasy fiction, has appealed to a far wider audience than that due to his depictions of real people plunged into abnormal, fantastical places that can be terrifying and magical in equal measure.

Photo by Steve Black

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990)

Gaiman’s first novel, that in many ways gave a perfect taster of his work to come, was his collaboration with fantasy fiction legend Terry Pratchett. The combination of both of these wild imaginations was a match made in writing heaven and, along with an impressive storyline, the humour in this book is unmatchable. Containing a balance of Gaiman’s forte for The Gods and Pratchett’s already well-known penchant for witches and other strange creatures Good Omens was named in BBC’s Big Read as one of the top 100 books of all time.