![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Here, though, it feels phoned in, like he’s ticking boxes. With the exception of the Hempstocks, everyone is flat and interchangeable. There’s not much suspense in this story, no matter how menacing Ursula Monkton becomes.Įven when I don’t like his stories, I enjoy Gaiman’s light, magical tone. Because the story is told as a flashback, you know the narrator won’t die at age seven. After the unnamed narrator accompanies his neighbor, Lettie Hempstock, to dispel an otherworldly creature and disobeys her instructions, the creature follows him home in the form of a beautiful (and creepy) woman named Ursula Monkton. I don’t usually begrudge Gaiman a few extra chapters because he has created many weird and beautiful images over the years, but The Ocean at the End of the Lane is thin. ![]() I started to tell the story of the opal miner and the Hempstock family (who have lived in the farm in my head for such a long time), and Jonathan was forgiving and kind when I finally admitted to myself and to him that this wasn’t a short story, and I let it become a novel instead. This novel began, although I did not know it was going to be a novel at the time, when Jonathan Strahan asked me to write him a short story. My first thought upon finishing Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane was “why isn’t this a short story?” I was satisfied to find Gaiman’s answer in the acknowledgements section: ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |