4 ideas
An adult narrator recalls, as a child, being taken to an elderly osteopath who claimed to have worked for Al Capone. The story braids a boy's injured arm, a violent adult world he half-understands, and the myth of the gangster.
Gaiman foregrounds that the remembered events keep shifting and contradicting themselves, admitting the narrator cannot be sure what really happened. The book is as much about the fallibility of recollection as about its content.
Dave McKean's shadowy, collage-like illustration visually enacts the instability of memory, dissolving faces and scenes. Image and theme fuse: the drawing is uncertain because the remembering is.
The menace of the Capone stories and the osteopath's rough hands reach the reader filtered through a child's partial comprehension. The gap between what the boy sees and what it means generates the dread.