Coraline

A short dark fairy tale of the old kind, neatly made and properly unsettling: a brave heroine must outwit the thing calling itself her other mother. The prose is clean and quick, and the whole can be read in a single sitting. Some readers find it takes a few chapters to turn strange, and it is creepier than a children’s label suggests. For anyone who likes their fairy tales with real menace.

Worth knowing Coraline Jones moves with her parents into a flat in an old house, explores because nobody has time for her, and finds a door in the drawing room that opens onto a brick wall by day and, one night, onto a flat exactly like hers where her other mother, with buttons for eyes, has been waiting and wants her to stay for ever. Neil Gaiman wrote it over about ten years, a few lines at a time, for his daughters, and published it in 2002; it won the Hugo and the Nebula for best novella and the Bram Stoker Award, and Henry Selick’s stop-motion film of 2009 is one of the few adaptations Gaiman has said improved on the book. It is short, about 160 pages, and for about nine and up, though it is the adults who find it frightening.

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