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Coraline
Neil Gaiman

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Shoshana, December 21, 2007

This is a cute enough horror/fairy tale, but I'm mystified by the awards it's received. Gaiman's setting is his usual "not here but not quite anywhere else" intersticial world whose distorted and malevolent denizens wish the protagonist no good. Like all hero's journeys, Coraline's includes guides and magical appurtenances (the latter lending a somewhat deus ex machina feel to the proceedings, but hey, it's a fairy tale). The description of the evil characters as having literal button eyes was jarring and took me out of the narrative repeatedly; they belong in a different story. True to his usual concerns, Gaiman gives us an inadequate, cool mother (it's asserted that she's emotionally attractive, but she comes off much less so than the father) and a frightening alter-mother, though it is refreshing to read something from him that is not about a sympathetic male protagonist with an unpleasant, inaccessible female love interest.

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