MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AP) -- Cemeteries don’t scare Neil Gaiman. Far from it. The best-selling author of horror and fantasy fables finds them "incredibly peaceful places."

Neil Gaiman poses in a comfortable place -- a cemetery. "There’s something marvelously restful," he says.

"I love going to graveyards. I love going to graveyards not because they’re spooky, but because there’s something marvelously restful. You know, you’ve got all these headstones. They have these wonderful little messages on them," Gaiman says.

Gaiman’s new novel, "The Graveyard Book," takes place in a cemetery, where an orphaned boy is raised by a vampire, a werewolf and a witch. The seed for the idea was planted some 25 years ago, Gaiman says, when he was living in his native England and would take his young son Michael to ride his tricycle in a nearby cemetery, since there was no real garden or yard at home.

Inspiration struck. Gaiman thought he could write a book similar to Rudyard Kipling’s classic "The Jungle Book," about a child adopted by wild animals. Instead, Gaiman would write about a child "who is adopted by dead people and taught all the things that dead people know." Read more...

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