Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a perfectly normal boy. Except that he lives in a graveyard, is being raised and educated by ghosts, and he has a solitary guardian who belongs neither to the world of the living nor the world of the dead. But it is in the land of the living that danger lurks for Bod, for it is there that the man Jack lives, and he has already killed all of Bod's family.