Coraline
by Neil Gaiman
Summary
Coraline Jones, bored and newly moved into an old house divided into flats, finds a small door that opens, at first, onto a bricked up wall. When she tries it again at night, the door opens instead onto an identical flat where an Other Mother and Other Father wait for her with black buttons sewn where their eyes should be, offering her every attention her real, distracted parents do not have time for. Coraline enjoys the attention until the Other Mother, a thing Gaiman calls the Beldam, asks her to stay forever and let the buttons be sewn over her own eyes. Coraline refuses and finds her real parents have vanished, trapped somewhere inside the other world, along with the ghosts of three earlier children the Beldam consumed. Guided by a cat that moves freely between both worlds, Coraline strikes a challenge with the Beldam: find the three children's hidden souls and her parents in exchange for her freedom. She wins through patience and nerve rather than any magic of her own, escaping with a stone that lets her see hidden things and severing the Beldam's crawling, disembodied hand in a well to keep it from following her home for good.
Gaiman writes in plain, level sentences that never raise their voice even as the material turns genuinely frightening, and that flatness is exactly what makes the book unsettling rather than cartoonish. It reads quickly, closer to a fable than a novel, and it has a reputation, borne out by many adult readers, for being far more disturbing than its length or its category as a children's book would suggest.
Historical Context & Significance
Coraline won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novella in 2003 and the Bram Stoker Award for best work for young readers in 2002, genre prizes rather than general literary ones. Gaiman has won a Newbery Medal and a Carnegie Medal for other books, but Coraline itself has never taken a major general fiction prize.
Henry Selick's 2009 stop motion film brought the story to a much wider audience and earned an Academy Award nomination for best animated feature, adding a new character, Wyborn Lovat, whom Gaiman later folded back into his own thinking about the story. The book has also become an opera, staged at London's Barbican in 2018, and an off Broadway musical. Its reputation as horror that happens to be shelved for children has held steady since publication, and it is regularly cited alongside Gaiman's Sandman comics as the clearest statement of what unsettles him about ordinary domestic life.