A Horror Story Dressed As a Fairy Tale

Off the Shelf By Sarah Jane Abbott    |   Tuesday, November 18, 2014 Sometimes, when we experience something as children that is too terrifying or unbelievable to remember, our brains hide it from us for our own protection. Then, years later, it can all come flooding back, triggered by an experience or a sight or even a word, like “ocean”. But memory is subjective - it can come back delicate, bathed in fluid surrealism. This is how it all comes back to the middle-aged male narrator of The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman’s narrator dutifully speaks at a funeral and in the time between the service and reception, he takes a drive to his childhood home but, upon arrival, feels inexplicably drawn to the small farm at the end of the lane. There he meets a woman that he vaguely remembers as the mother - or grandmother - or some relation - of his childhood friend, Lettie. He asks to sit by the pond they played next to as children and the woman points him in the right direction. The narrator vaguely remembers that Lettie didn’t call it a pond. She called it…a sea? No, an ocean, she called it an ocean. With that one word, the memory of a childhood battle for survival against evil so terrifying the narrator has never thought of it since it happened washes over him and he is swept back to the menacingly magical time of his youth when his life was barely spared. More