The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the story of an unnamed protagonist; an adult, recalling long-forgotten events in his childhood which revolve around a suicide and the three generations of Hempstock women who live on Hempstock Farm, where a duckpond might be the ocean at the edge of the world.
Drawn from events and places from Gaiman's childhood and peopled with recurring figures from his fiction (the Hempstocks have, he says, been with him a very long time), this is cosmic horror at its most intensely personal. The narrator is more lost than the reader throughout, and the fears of childhood - not of death, but of isolation, abandonment, disbelief and the confusions of the adult world - are evoked to sometimes chilling effect through the combination of the young protagonist's memories and his older self's commentary.
The book is not long and the plot not involved, but the prose is wonderful and the imagery compelling throughout, even at its most repulsive. If most of the characters are more archetypes than individuals, this is a consequence - and a deliberate one - of employing a child's viewpoint, through which things are simple and people are essentially who they are, with the possibility that they might not be mined as a rich source of horror.
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