Think I'd rather not have read that

[beccaelizabeth]

Last night I read The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman.
I've owned it for ages now but I've been putting off reading it cause from what I read it was going to be somewhere between scary and disturbing.
I was not wrong. That messed with my head. Cause it isn't exactly what I'd call fantasy, one of the blurbs said it's more magical realism which seems to mean it's basically real stuff with light effects on it, the weird fantasy elements just kind of fade back when I remember the story, and then it's just domestic stuff and bad things happening to children, mostly done by the ones meant to look after them.
I mean, I can see it's got all magic stuff all over it, but the memorable to me bits are the extra triggery suicide, child abuse including apparent attempted murder depicted from the child's point of view, and bad things trying to talk the child into effectively giving up and killing himself. With a splash of watching one parent have sex with the babysitter, which was just creepy. And the babysitter promising to lock the kid up with all their nightmares and tell disgusting lies about them. And the way being a child just meant everything was going to go wrong and they could do nothing about it.
The conversation in the back says something about how the story is about the powerlessness of childhood.
How it isn't a children's story because children's stories have hope.

It isn't an adventure story with cunning and winning in the end, it's about enduring and trying over and over to get help until the one remaining trustworthy grown up makes the bad shit go away. And that's after terrible things have happened, including at the end basically a child dying, though in the way of magic they might at some future time come back to life, and the boy's memory is altered so he remembers her as gone to Australia. She's not left. She's killed, with some future hope of resurrection. And he keeps visiting her when his life goes wrong and remembering it all but forgetting again when he leaves, which is its own kind of creepy.

So it just felt bad to read and felt bad after reading and then I curled up with Tony Stark and Bruce Banner and Clint Barton and remembered growing up to be heroes can happen and eventually got to sleep, and couldn't get around to thinking of any reason to get up today until the afternoon.

Which I'd been doing better on recently.

So. I'm absolutely sure that the horrible grey hollow feeling the book left me with was not what the author set out to do. Another reader would get an entirely different reading from this book.

But if you think these kinds of things are likely to bother you, probably you would like to not read this one.

Comments

[ericadawn16.livejournal.com]

Thank you,  I had worried about that.