I’ve read a few of Neil Gaiman’s books, counting Neverwhere among my all-time favorites, but had never really given Coraline more than a passing glance, since the version I saw in the bookstore was the children’s picture book. But then a friend at work (the same one who raved about another of my recent reads, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) recommended this one as well, saying it scared her so much she could barely bring herself to turn the pages. Who could pass up such an enthusiastic reaction?

The version we have is not the picture book, rather it is a simple trade paperback with creepy black and white sketches scattered throughout. Coraline lives in a multi-family style house with her parents. Their neighbors include an eccentric old man who is training his mice to perform a circus, and a pair of elderly sisters, both former stage actresses. There is a door in Coraline’s house, that opens onto a brick wall, put there when the huge house was parceled up into smaller dwellings. Then one day, when Coraline is bored and restless and her mother has gone to the store, she goes exploring, and opens the door to find the brick wall gone and a dark hallway in its place. What she finds on the other side is a funhouse mirror-world of her own, where things are almost – but not quite – the same as in her world. The mice are menacing rats, her ‘other’ bedroom is filled with strange animate toys, her neighbors are sinister caricatures of themselves and worst of all, her ‘other’ mother and father are paper-white, with button eyes and an overwhelming desire to keep Coraline with them. Her ‘other’ mother is particularly frightening, and so with the help of a talking cat, Coraline must use her wits to rescue her real parents and return home.

There’s an interview with Neil Gaiman at the back of the book, and he says something along the lines of how when adults read the book, they read it as a scary story, but that when kids read it, they read it as an adventure story. And that’s quite true, I imagine – I certainly did. Coraline is a modern fairy tale in the traditional sense, not the watered-down versions we’ve come to know.