The Ocean at the End of the Lane

A middle aged man returns to Sussex for a funeral and finds himself drawn down a familiar lane to a farm he has not consciously thought about in decades, and sitting by a pond there, he remembers, in full, a childhood he had otherwise forgotten. At seven, a lodger staying with his family stole the family car and gassed himself to death inside it, an act that tore a hole between worlds and let something old and hungry cross into his. He wakes with a coin lodged in his own throat and turns to Lettie Hempstock, an eleven year old girl next door who is, along with her mother and grandmother, far older and stranger than she looks, for help binding the thing back where it came from. He lets go of Lettie's hand once, in fear, and something latches onto his foot; soon after, a woman named Ursula Monkton arrives as his family's new housekeeper, seduces his father, turns his own family against him, and very nearly drowns him in the bathtub, and he realizes she is the entity itself, using him as her door into the world. He flees to the Hempstock farm, where the women cut the last fragment of the creature out of his foot, and Lettie confronts Ursula directly, calling down scavenging, birdlike entities to destroy her. Those same hunger birds then turn on the boy to finish consuming the otherworldly matter still lodged in him, and Lettie throws herself between him and them, apparently dying to save him. The book closes back in the present, where the elderly Hempstocks reveal, gently, that this is not the boy's first return visit as an adult, that he forgets and comes back again each time, and that Lettie, resting somewhere in an ocean contained inside their garden pond, is not entirely gone.

Gaiman writes it in a hushed, retrospective adult voice remembering a child's plain, unembellished terror, and the novel is short enough to read in one long sitting, though its horror sits closer to grief and the loss of childhood safety than to shocks; it is a book about how much of what actually happens to children gets quietly forgotten, or never told, by the adults meant to protect them.