Coraline
Gaiman, Neil
Illustrated by: McKean, Dave
HarperCollins Children's Books 2002
ISBN 0-380-97778-8
162pp
Date finished: 2003-03-08
[Buy this book] (why?)
Gaiman's ~40,000-word novella is a creepy children's story. Coraline lives in an apartment with her parents. In the apartment there is a bricked-up door. One day Coraline opens the door and find a corridor behind it that leads to an unsettling parody of her house, with parallel versions of her room, her apartment, the other residents of the building, and her parents. Coraline mistrusts her "other mother" and the story soon turns into a challenge and the resulting exploratory quest. (The story would be well-suited to an interactive fiction game, now that I think about it.)
It's certainly a good story for children. For an adult, it's less so; you can see where it's going, and the journey there is reasonably interesting but not outstanding. There are memorable elements such as the mouse circus and the other mother, and generic elements such as a helpful cat and the search for three objects; overall, though, I find it leans toward the generic side. Dave McKean's illustrations for each chapter complement the text nicely.