As I read more books by Neil Gaiman, I realize I really do like him a lot! My latest read, Coraline, is the horror/fantasy story of Coraline Jones and the events that transpire when her family moves into an old house that has been divided into individual apartments.
An ordinary brick wall that separates their apartment and the one adjacent to theirs miraculously disappears the day Coraline opens the door unaccompanied by anyone else. That mysterious doorway then becomes the entry point to a parallel universe - with a twisted version of the exact same people in her life: retired stage actresses Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, Mr. Bobo and his circus mice, and her Other Mother and Other Father.
Where the terror of buttons sewn into eyes drives her back to her own world, the “Help Us” scrawled on the glass takes her back on a heroic journey through the creepy “Other World”, armed with but a lucky stone that has a hole in the centre.
Bravery isn’t the absence of fear - quite contrarily, it is being very afraid, and yet doing the right thing anyway. That is the heart-warming message that comes through as we follow Coraline’s terrifying rescue involving dead children, ghosts, dog bats, humans melted together in a cocoon … and of course, the evil Other Mother.
Another fantastic work by Gaiman, filled with that unapologetic surrender to unfettered fantasy that is, in my opinion, his trademark.
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