The Ocean at the End of the Lane is an extended short story in which a middle-aged man visits the home of a childhood neighbor in Sussex, England, where he revisits strange and magical happenings from his distant past. Gaiman does a wonderful job translating real anxieties and fears into childhood monsters and magic - e.g. monsters become a way for the narrator (as a child) to talk indirectly about an uncomfortable and possibly abusive parent-child relationship. Much hinges on the subjectivity and mutability of memory. 
 I love how the system of magic is defined through suggestion, never fully codified - giving just the barest hint at a broader, stranger universe where worlds like ours are numerous like grains of sand, and unnamed creatures fiddle easily with the fabric of reality. There's a twinge of melancholy that the narrator (and, presumably, the reader) is confined to a safe but ignorant life while stranger battles are waged incomprehensibly above.