Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Coraline stopped and listened. She knew she was doing something wrong, and she was trying to listen for her mother coming back, but she heard nothing. Then Coraline put her hand on the doorknob and turned it; and, finally, she opened the door.

It opened on to a dark hallway. The bricks had gone as if they'd never been there. There was a cold, musty smell coming through the open doorway: it smelled like something very old and very slow.

Coraline went through the door.

-Coraline 

First things first: Coraline is a genuinely scary book. I thought, having seen the movie, that I would be fairly well prepared for any spooky bits, but as it turned out that did not help so much at all. It turns out my imagination is even better than a (very good!) film. Yay?

I probably ought to back things up for a moment: plot. In Neil Gaiman's story, British schoolgirl Coraline Jones moves to a new home one summer with her mother and father. Coraline's parents mean well, but they're busy, and Coraline often has to amuse herself. She's often bored, and she's also grown tired of picking at dinners she finds inedible and buying the drabbest of school uniforms. She's looking for adventure.

Then she finds the door described in the passage above. It leads to adventure, to be sure--a whole new world, actually. There Coraline finds another mother and father that at first glance seem just like her own--except dinner there is tastier, and her clothes are nicer, and her parents are ready to drop everything to keep her amused. She could live in this world forever, her other mother tells her, if she'd just do one tiny thing....

Like any place where everything seems perfect, this other world is actually rotten to the core. It's also, Coraline discovers, not so easy to escape. She finds herself in extraordinary danger as she attempts to regain the life she once found so boring.

I've given some thought as to why I found Coraline so scary, and I think it's a mix of a couple of things. One is the way that Gaiman takes what should be Coraline's safe haven (her home, her family) and twists it into the stuff of nightmares. I don't wish to spoil the story, but there's a bit toward the end with the other father--just unbelievably creepy to me. I also think that the fact that Coraline is essentially on her own in this other world makes things quite scary. In the film, at least, she has her friend Wybie, but in the book she's quite alone with the exception of a mysterious, unnamed cat. If I were all alone in that place as an adult I'd be petrified, so it's difficult for me to imagine the terror of encountering this other world as a child. Shiver. Well done, Mr. Gaiman.

Up next: Still lagging a bit behind in updating this blog, so I've already finished Rick Riordan's The Last Olympian.