f you don't know that Neil Gaiman is a Big Deal (that's right—we busted out the capital letters for this one), then we feel majorly sorry for you. But we can also guess why you don't know about this lion of the fantasy genre: you live in the United States (or, you know, you just don't read much fantasy). In Britain, however, where Gaiman comes from, his book covers are plastered along the Underground tunnels in poster form, streets are renamed after his fictional tales, and in 2013 his book The Ocean at the End of the Lane won the prestigious Book of the Year award—and for good reason. The man has such a vivid imagination; he creates whole worlds that would feel right at home in a Tim Burton movie, and then plops them down in the middle of pastoral settings in such a way that you think to yourself: "Yeah, okay—sure. There's always been an eccentric family down the road, of course they're secretly immortal beings with infinite power and wisdom." If nothing else, you'll never look at your neighbors the same way—definitely not after reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, we are listening to a jaded middle-aged man who's gone home for a family member's funeral reminisce about some crazy adventures he had when he was seven years old and befriended an odd little girl named Lettie Hempstock. The thing is, though, while he's visiting the farm where everything went down, he can remember all the strange, mystical occurrences—like being attacked by an angry, malicious circus tent and pulling a kitten up from the ground like a ripe carrot—but the minute he steps foot off that property it all seems like a dream that's too hard to remember clearly. So we, the readers, are left wondering—was this whole ordeal some kind of rare insight into aspects of reality that we're normally protected from knowing, or was this some desperate attempt of a bored little boy to inject a little adventure into his otherwise lonely childhood? Either way, it's a story that will leave you feeling surprisingly haunted—by both the devastatingly real moments as well as the magical surrealism that permeates the little boy's memories. The best part is, Neil Gaiman has touted this book as by far his most autobiographical work yet—so we get to pick it apart and wonder exactly which bits really happened. Let's hope it's not the part where [spoiler alert] his dad tries to drown him in the bathtub. That'd be pretty unfortunate.