Use of references as the way of creating a character in Neil Gaiman's "The graveyard book"

This article is devoted to one of the little-studied aspects of modern English literary fairy-tale: references as one of the distinctive features of the genre. To show how the references to different sources help the author not only to create a unique character but provide him with the opportunity to fulfill this character with extra meanings the detailed analysis of the Sleer, one of the characters from Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book", is included in the article. The analysis shows that the author used references to different literary sources, folklore tales and myth.