Being pulled into a story feels particularly magical when there's a delicate balance of fantasy and truth. Having a wild imagination as a child and faint and fallible memories as an adult seems like a pretty common experience. I love the idea of taking what's left of our own difficult memories and building fantastic stories around them.
I also love how reading a particular story can lead to seeing pieces of that story in random places. Or rather, seeing the pieces of the mysterious goo that lurks beneath all of our stories, art, and lives. As a little anecdote, here's an excerpt from The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and a random image that popped up on the rectangle of glass I look at way too much.
Where it devoured the grass, nothing remained — a perfect nothing, only a color that reminded me of gray, but a formless, pulsing gray like the shifting static of our television screen when you dislodged the aerial cord and the picture had gone completely.
Reading this also brought me spinning back into a recent movie I really enjoyed, that felt like it shared some themes, The Boy and the Heron.
I guess I just really like magic realism or whatever.