In Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, a toddler, escaped from an assassin sent to murder his family, finds safety in a graveyard. He grows up among the dead and the undead, with ghosts as parents, a vampire guardian, and a witch as friend. Beneath the graveyard lie older evils, and in the outside world the assassin is still searching.

It’s a children’s book, and, like all good children’s books, it works even better as an adult’s book.

Some people believe you should protect kids from the morbid, because it will scar their fragile minds. These people have clearly forgotten what it was like. Morbid books take kids seriously, they don’t lie.

Gaiman’s novels sometimes feel too neatly plotted. Events fit precisely together, like the output of a plot machine. Anansi Boys had that problem. The Graveyard Book has some of it, especially when the main plot is wrapped up. What works best here is the mood and the theme: The graveyard and the boy.

The movie version of Coraline, Gaiman’s previous children’s book, is due out in February. If it does well, The Graveyard Book is visual and short enough to make a natural followup. (But please leave American Gods alone.)

Alan Moore has also written a novel. It wasn’t enough for him to be the world’s greatest comic book writer? He must put authors to shame as well?

Yes. Yes, he must.

The stories in Voice of the Fire span 6000 years, but only a small geographical area. It’s sort of a mystical history of Northampton, told by odd and abnormal people: a retarded boy, a sociopath, a decapitated head, a witch, two madmen. The stories are unconnected, except through common themes such as cripples, detached heads, people burned alive, and the magic attached to the place itself. The events of one story become the legends of the next, echoing through dreams and visions. And the final narrator is Alan Moore himself, another odd and abnormal Northampton resident.

Moore doesn’t make it easy for us. The first story is written in a strange, but consistent, grammar, so that every sentence is a riddle. As in, 50 pages of “Fire’s black bout of he’s eyes. Fire’s blood on of he’s horns.” First-time readers of Alan Moore will give up, and should first get to know him through his comics. (No, the movie versions don’t count.) Fans will know that it’s worth it, because Alan Moore is a genius.

Jack Vance’s Dying Earth novels are set in the last years of the Sun’s life, when technology has given way to (or become) magic.

The series begins on a dark romantic note with The Dying Earth (1950). Earth’s remaining people live a capricious fairy tale existence, subject to wizards, monsters, and random cruelty. One moment you’re happily torturing some unlucky traveller. The next you’ve had your eyes gouged out for use in an art project.

With The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) and Cugel’s Saga (1983), Vance turns the end into light farce, which suits it better. The protagonist is Cugel the Clever, a trickster who travels the world in search of revenge. The joke is on everyone, both Cugel and the people he cheats, robs, or accidentally causes the brutal death of. Everyone is a fool or a crook, and deserve whatever they get. At least Cugel thinks so.

The satire in Rhialto the Marvellous (1984) is more subtle, and less funny. At one point, thousands of youths are preserved in capsules, to awaken in an expected Golden Age a hundred centuries later. As the time of awakening approaches they’re discovered by cannibals, who treat them as a convenient source of freshly preserved meat. Yum!

Vance’s characters find little to admire in the end-times. Nations, fads and True Religions (And We Mean It This Time) have come and gone for aeons, but people remain the same. What then is there left to believe in? Vance’s attitude is that when everything is past, everything is farce.