style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">It begins with a funeral and ends with a death. Yet The Ocean at the End of the Lane isn’t a morbid novel. Neil Gaiman, one of the best fabulists of our age, knows that telling stories is a good way of keeping the dark at bay. He also knows that the stories that do the job best are those with plenty of the dark already within them.