Needing to clear his head after a funeral, a man drives to his childhood home. Drawn to an old friend's house at the end of the lane, long forgotten memories resurface, and suddenly the man is a boy again.

Neil Gaiman is once again a master of tone and atmosphere; this book has some of the creepiest horror elements that I've read in a Neil Gaiman book to date, and waves of nostalgia permeate as the narrator reminisces on forgotten childhood memories.

Unlike past books, brevity does not work in Gaiman's favor in The Ocean At The End Of The Lane. Coraline excels in hyper-focused storytelling, while The Graveyard Book successfully ties a series of vignettes into a larger, overarching narrative. However, The Ocean At The End Of The Lane feels largely unfocused and distracted at times, racing towards its conclusion rather than letting it naturally unfold. 

For the first time in a Neil Gaiman book, characters feel inauthentic, but this may be due in part to the narrator's unreliable narration; one of the characters in the story outright says "Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not." This is important, as memory, perception, and reality exist as major reoccurring themes throughout the book.

The distinction between childhood and adulthood, and often times the blurred line between the two is also referenced heavily throughout the story. The sense of helplessness experienced by the narrator in his memories is echoed by other adult characters; after all, as one character mentions, there really are no such things as adults, there are just children in much bigger bodies.

Neil Gaiman has been responsible for some of the better books that I've read so far this year. While The Ocean At The End Of The Lane thrives in its thematic story-telling and atmosphere, it ultimately fails to reach the same heights as Gaiman's other works.