Mythic Writers Blog

“The boundaries are always there—between the graveyard and the world beyond, between life and death, and the crossing of them.” – Neil Gaiman (found on the page for The Graveyard Book)

Here’s another piece of the mythic fiction puzzle. Boundaries. More specifically, crossing boundaries. Taking a quick, mental inventory of my favorite books and stories, it seems that they all involve crossing boundaries. The humans cross into some otherworld. The faeries cross into the human world. The ghosts cross into our world. The humans die for a short time and cross into the afterlife. It’s all about crossing boundaries.

And it all comes back to that idea that there are other worlds, other dimensions, other places besides our ordinary, everyday world to cross to and from. Is that other place (or maybe there’s more than one?) where myths and gods come from? Or is it where they’ve retreated to when we became too difficult to live with? I don’t know, but I always hope and at least half believe that it’s there, it’s just waiting for us.

I think this is going to be another placeholder post, because now I’m rather excited by the idea of making a list of favorite books and stories and movies that involve the theme of crossing over or boundaries. If you think of any, please leave me a note in the comments so I can add it to what I hope will be a continually growing list.