When a middle-aged man returns to his childhood home after attending a funeral, memories resurface as he stares at the duck pond--a pond his neighbor Lettie once told him was an ocean--and the reader is launched into a flashback. 
 I'm almost surprised this is marketed as adult fiction. I mean, I know exactly why it is, but take out the prologue and epilogue and it's a story about childhood-monsters and memories and the loss of innocence-not unlike Coraline. Still, I love love loved it. Gaiman has a knack for taking the ordinary and making it magic. This books begins rooted in reality and then bleeds into much more; a dark, timeless fairy tale. It moved me. And it demands to be re-read. 
 Originally posted here.