Great shout for Neil Gaiman. That's one of my favourite openings. I have a vague memory of putting a load of my favourite openings in the comments section of your previous article, but I'm not sure if I included this one from The Turn of the Screw:

"The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child."