The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
There are four levels in the spiritual ecosystem in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. The smallest are humans. Fleas play with humans like a cat plays with a mouse. Varmints consume fleas. And the elder Hempstock ladies deal with varmints off-screen, with no trouble. Most of the time.
So you don’t realize at first how much more powerful Lettie is than the protagonist. But Lettie is a predator who eats the predators that eat the predators that eat human beings.
This is a fantastic technique. It reminds me of Lovecraft. The vastness of the vistas that open up is what Kant would call sublime. I attempt this in my own stories. I can get 3 levels: a monster that the monster is afraid of. I haven’t found it easy to get to 4.
There’s also the hat tip to Tom Bombadil. Although he takes the form of the weird sisters. Or the Norns; they do literally sew and snip thread, each of them doing a different part of the magic.
But Gaiman is doing that Sandman thing where he makes his own gods. The weird sisters are his jumping off point. He’s not bound to them. He has a particular talent for that. Common to great fantasy writers, but most of them take hundreds of pages to get there. Gaiman gets there very, very quickly.
Love the jar of shadows dissolved in vinegar. Love the broken toys. Love the funeral scene (which is an homage to Final Fantasy 7 or to whatever the FF7 funeral scene was an homage to).