But the dangers are real, and part of the richness of the story comes from the fact that it offers many meanings without imposing any. Gaiman is too intelligent and subtle to invoke the supernatural - this is much more mysterious than that - and too wise to let Coraline face the horrors alone: she has an ally in a sardonic and very feline cat. 'I'm your other mother,' she says.Īnd so begins a struggle for Coraline's soul.

And when she discovers a sinister woman there, who looks a little like her mother but has eyes that are big black buttons, the matter-of-factness of the woman's response when Coraline says 'Who are you?' is both disarming and terrifying. When Coraline finds a door that opens into another flat strangely like her own, but subtly different (thus making the classic transition from here, where we live, to there, where the mysteries begin), we believe what we're told. Gaiman brings it off with a skill that you wouldn't notice unless you were looking for it.Īnd the matter-of-fact tone is important, because this is a marvellously strange and scary book. This is the best point of view from which to tell a story about a child: the telling voice is an adult's, so it can plausibly observe and say things a child would not, but all the sympathy is with the child. The narrative voice is not Coraline's, but hers are the only thoughts and feelings we are told about, so she is at the centre of the story.

Coraline's parents are kindly but absent-minded and preoccupied with their work, so Coraline - who seems to be about Alice's age - has had to rely on herself, not only for entertainment, but also for sensible things like eating and washing and putting herself to bed. Coraline lives alone with her parents in a flat in an old house, the other flats being occupied by an eccentric old man who trains mice, and two elderly retired actresses. The story occupies a territory somewhere between Lewis Carroll's Alice and Catherine Storr's classic fantasy of warning and healing, Marianne Dreams.

Coraline the graphic novel neil gaiman