The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

Another book club book, my boss likens this to "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" for adults, and I think her description is very apt. It's a novella, really, of a grown man remembering a harrowing, magic-fraught couple of days when he was seven. He lived in the English countryside, and at the end of their lane was the Hempstock farm: Old Mrs. Hempstock, who likes to keep the full moon always shining into the bedroom windows; Mrs. Hempstock, a strong motherly figure with a no-nonsense attitude and just the right comfort food for any meal; and Lettie Hempstock, who has been eleven years old for a very, very long time and who insists that the pond behind the farmhouse is actually an ocean. The trouble starts when a lodger kills himself on the edge of their farm, letting into the world a thing that quickly upsets the balance. The language is ethereal, but also concrete in the way something narrated by a seven year old would be. I liked it, but more as something unique than as a genre I'd like to read more of.