The narrator is a boy, just turned seven. His parents have financial difficulties and take in a lodger. Soon the lodger kills himself, and the boy is the one who finds him. This is the beginning of a spiral of terrors, where an otherworldly entity makes its way into this world, into the boy’s house, and into the boy himself.

The boy gets help from Lettie Hempstock, an eleven-year-old in the house at the end of the lane, and her mother and grandma. They turn out to be not quite from this world either.

The boy may be the narrator but he is mostly a passive participant in this story. The nameless alien entity comes into his life, and he cannot do much about it – all he can do is go to Lettie and ask for help. And when that doesn’t quite solve the problem, all he can do is wait for the Hempstocks to do something more about it.

This passivity, this helpless hanging on while knowing that there’s nothing you can do, is not a comfortable feeling. There is no sense of adventure, of daring – it’s mostly just about being afraid. That is what, to me, pushes the book from the fantasy genre into horror. I picked up The Ocean at the End of the Lane expecting it to be a modern fairy tale but got a horror story instead, and I’m not very fond of horror stories, no matter how good they are.

But this passivity is also very necessary, because the whole book is an allegory of childhood (certain angles of it at least). The book drips with allegory: life can be terrifying when you’re a child and the world is large and incomprehensible; parents are not always strong and wise; adults can seem like monsters at times; childhood innocence lost; adults don’t remember what it is like to be a child; etc.

The allegory is layered on so thickly that at times the story itself gets second priority. The boy is ordinary, unexceptional, not particularly interesting in any way. Which of course helps the allegory along, because the boy is everyman, but doesn’t make the story any stronger.

The themes of myth and fairy tales and ancient “gods” in a modern world is very Gaiman in a way, but at times the book reminded me more of Stephen King. It’s a Stephen King book set in Sussex instead of New Hampshire: a horror story that revolves around kids and has nameless horrors that you cannot afterwards describe, from beyond space and time.

It is all perfectly well executed, with wonderful skill and great mastery of language. But it feels more like a personal therapeutic/philosophical exercise than a novel. Felt great while I was reading it, but disappointing afterwards. I liked both Coraline and The Graveyard Book better: the ideas were fresher, the central characters more active participants in their own stories.

Finally, it really really irritates me that the boy gets the blame, and blames himself, for everything that goes wrong, when he has no idea that his actions could possibly lead to this. He thinks it’s his fault when it really is the oh-so-great-and-powerful Lettie who doesn’t properly explain the situation to him.

Quite often someone (especially a child) in a book or a movie is expected to do or not do certain things, but is not given sufficient information to make the right decisions. It is an annoying plot device. “Don’t let go of my hand” is not enough of a warning – the difference is huge between “don’t let go of my hand or you may fall and skin your knee” and “don’t let go of my hand or the world may end”. In some movies they don’t even say anything, and only when the poor kid has done X, someone tells them that they really really shouldn’t have done that. If something is so bloody important, you better say so before!