“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Dave McKean
Harper Trophy (2003)
162 pages

Ah, I read this during Halloween or thereabouts, pretty much unintentionally. I’ve read the book before, and I just picked something up randomly as I was sitting in front of the television and ended up re-reading Coraline instead.

It’s a deliciously creepy story. Coraline creeped me out when I first read it, and I had wondered how the younger readers would have handled it. (”Probably they wouldn’t think it as scary,” my sister says. “What’s so frightening about having black buttons as eyes?” When you think back about it, what is it so frightening about black buttons, you wonder? I guess we grew up along the way.)

I’m a tad biased when it comes to Neil Gaiman, I suppose. I’ve always liked his work, some more than others, and Coraline is one of my favourites, after Good Omens and Stardust. I find his blog awesomely entertaining. He’s one of the few writers I don’t mind reading short stories they wrote.

Anyway. Coraline is a story about a girl (”It’s Coraline. Not Caroline. Coraline,” she keeps saying, but everyone still gets it wrong) who has just moved to a new house with her parents. It’s a big house, and they share it with a few other people: Ms Spink and Ms Forcible, two retired thespians living on the ground floor, and a crazy old man with a moustache who trains mice who lives upstairs. Coraline’s parents love her, but sometimes they are a bit preoccupied, so she’s left alone, quite bored.

She finds a door that opens to an apartment similar to hers, and she finds her other mother there, and also her other father. The toys are more interesting, her other parents more attentive. As much as Coraline enjoyed herself there, she realises that this is not home, and when her other mother asks Coraline to stay, she refuses. When she goes back home, she finds her real parents are missing. Coraline knows that her other mother has captured them, and the only way to save them is to play a game to set them free.

I think what I like most about this book is the atmosphere. It’s dark, but it’s funny too, in places. The illustrations are wonderful. (I almost gave myself a heart attack when I flipped a page and saw the other mother staring out of it.) Coraline is brave and resourceful, and rather serious and solemn, actually — she never capers off or act terribly childish, and she knows what is important, and what it is she really wants.

It’s a fun read. Just don’t read it alone in the dark in a new apartment.

.