Neil Gaiman’s Witch’s Headstone…

I was out noodling around on youtube.com yesterday and, for reasons I can’t really explain, decided to search on Neil Gaiman, just to see what’s there. Well, as it turns out, there’s quite a bit. Neil, who’s a really entertaining speaker, travels the world talking here and there. While he’s there, perfectly nice people seem to quietly hold up their mobile phones, video what he says, and post it to youtube.com. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. You can see him being interviewed, answering questions, and even reading stories. If you search carefully, you’ll see him reading “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, which is in my new year’s best.

There are a bunch of other readings, including one of Neil’s new story “The Witch’s Headstone”, which I think ranks amongst the best stories he’s done in the past few years. As he explains in his Q&A, the story grew out of a time when he and his young family used to live across the road from a cemetery. They had no garden of their own, so Neil would take his then infant son across to the cemetery, where they’d play amongst the headstones. That led to him imagining the tale of boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard, which would eventually evolve into the book he’s now working on, The Graveyard Book. As it turns out, “The Witch’s Headstone” is one of the early chapters of The Graveyard Book, and is really quite delightful. It’s sort of Charles Addams in Bradbury’s October Country, but in England instead.

I don’t really want to say much more about it, but the best (and first) place to read it is in Jack and Gardner’s new anthology Wizards, which contains tons of other cool stuff as well. Garth Nix has a lovely story in it, one of his best, as do  Gene Wolfe, Andy Duncan, Terry Dowling and a bunch of other people. I’ve not finished the book yet, but what I have read is good. You need to check it out.