  'I love graveyards,' author Neil Gaiman says. 'I actually discovered my love of graveyards about 20 years ago and it was the fault of the press.'
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You’d think that with Marvel begging him to make “Dr. Strange,” the fourth and final “Absolute Sandman” on the way, a two-issue “last-ever” Batman story in the works and a rumoured stint writing an episode of “Dr. Who” in the offing, the last thing Neil Gaiman would be doing is revisiting a story he hatched in a Sussex graveyard 23-years-ago. But that’s exactly what’s happened with his new young-adult novel, “The Graveyard Book.”
Before he packed his bags and set up shop in Minneapolis, the house Gaiman was living in was “tall, thin and spindly“ – a danger to his two-year-old son, he recalls, “because with all those precipitous stairs, he would have died.”
But with no yard, Gaiman, 47, had to be creative to keep his boy out of trouble. And he was in luck. The cemetery across the road offered plenty of space for his child to roam, while dad could read.
“I remember looking at him one day thinking, ‘My God he looks happy,’” Gaiman says from his home in the Twin Cities. “And I thought I could do something like ‘The Jungle Book’ (Rudyard Kipling’s classic tale of a boy adopted by wild animals) and set it in a graveyard and call it ‘The Graveyard Book.’”
Flushed with excitement, Gaiman went up to his office and started trying to write it. “I read the first page,” he laughs gently, “and I thought, ‘This is a better idea than I am a writer. So I will put the idea away until I’m a better writer.’”
Trying off and on between writing gigs on “The Sandman” – Gaiman’s 10-year fantastical expansion on the DC universe – and his bestselling adult novels “Neverwhere,” “Stardust,” “American Gods,” “Anansi Boys” and “Fragile Things,” by 2003 he realized he was just going to have to buckle down.
“It didn’t matter if I was a good enough writer; I just had to write this.”
Opening mid-scene as a hapless tot escapes into a graveyard trailed by the assassin who’s killed his parents and older sister, much of the story centres around the orphan, christened Nobody (Bod) Owens by the ghosts who adopt him.
A childish fantasy that doubles as an elegiac rumination on mortality, Gaiman set the book in a British cemetery so Bod could interact with historic characters.
“If I set it in Canada or the U.S., I can’t go back that far. I can go back a couple of hundred years, then I have some Indians and then I’m done. The joy for me of a graveyard was the idea of being able to do people from 200 hundred years ago and people from a thousand years ago.”
And so far the book, which is already a fixture among the New York Times’ best-selling children’s titles, is creating the kinds of conversations the author loves having with his readers.
“I get 10-year-olds writing to me and saying, ‘I want to be Bod. I want to live in a graveyard; I want to have those powers,’” says Gaiman. “And I have adults writing and saying, ‘This is one of the most positive books about parenthood and letting go.’ So what we’ve got here, are adults and children relating to the story in very different ways.”
The ambiguous end of “The Graveyard Book” leaves both camps with much to look forward to, and Gaimen is keen to keep the story going. “With this, it’s definitely true that the model is “The Jungle Book,” and Kipling did write two, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were a second ‘Graveyard Book.’”
With his slick screenplay for last year’s “Beowulf” making him a household name outside the fantasy set, Gaiman thinks kid books and comics are less of a niche market nowadays.
“I think basically, people like good stories,” he says, paying a modest tribute to “Sandman’s” appeal to comic newbies. “People like stories that take them places they’ve never been.”
Still, that doesn’t mean he’s about to let just anyone give his comic opus “The Dark Knight” treatment. “The capacity for f---ing up ‘Sandman’ – for just utterly screwing it up and making something that is awful and embarrassing and terrible – is huge.
“But,” he says, likening the prospect to a night out, “’Sandman,’ if done properly, could be the most perfect sushi meal.”
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