亚茨拉斐尔（迈克尔·辛 Michael Sheen 饰）是守卫城门的天使，而克劳利（大卫·田纳特 David Tennant 说）则是堕落的恶魔。两人几千年来都一直隐姓埋名生活在人间，并且通过不断的尝试，在天堂和地狱之间建立了井水不犯河水的互惠互利的关系。
克劳利奉撒旦之命，将婴儿敌基督送到修道院，同美国外交官的新生儿做交换，当敌基督长到11岁时，就是世界末日来临之时。为了防止世界被毁灭，亚茨拉斐尔和克劳利决定通过影响这个孩子的善恶观念来避免世界的终结。在努力了11年之后，两人震惊的发现，他们竟然弄错了对象，而真正的敌基督此时生活在一个名为塔德菲尔德偏僻小镇中。

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.
A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

《鬼妈妈》曾获2002年布莱姆·斯托克奖、2003年雨果奖最佳中篇小说、2003年星云奖最佳中篇小说、2003美国图书协会最佳青少年读物。是一部既写给孩子、又是写给大人看的风格诡异的幻想小说。作者尼尔·盖曼自己说：“我原本打算为我的女儿写一个5到1O页的短故事，但是故事自己有了生命……孩子们会把它当成一个有趣的冒险，大人看了却会做噩梦。”