Just Finished Reading Neil Gaiman's Coraline

Over the course of his writing career, fantasy writer Neil Gaiman has occasionally come out with children's stories...the 2003 novella Coraline is one of them.  Of course, that's not to say that grown-ups can't read them...I'm an example.  I was a little taken aback by the scariness of this tale that, as I have mentioned, is intended for children.  Let me explain...

Back when I was a kid, back in the mid-1960s, my parents would often take me and my sister Anita (who was and will always be four years older than me) to movies...and that meant going to the drive-in theater, of which there were many in the south Florida area.  If memory serves me correctly, it was around 1964 and I was seven or eight when we all went to see the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho.  Apparently, my parents had already seen it because my mother had mentioned something about not ever wanting to stay at a motel after having watched it.  But here we children were, sitting in the back seat and completely unprepared for what would happen in this grisly horror flick.  What were my mother and father thinking, anyway?  I get the same kind of feeling about Neil Gaiman with this Coraline story: it is apparently designed to scare the reader...I can easily see little children experiencing some nasty nightmares as a result...

Coraline is a little girl in England who has just moved with her parents to a new flat in a big house.  There are other tenants living in the floors both above and below.  In her own living room, hidden to an extent, is a mysterious door.  Being naturally curious, Coraline wonders where it leads to, but it is locked.  Her mother opens it, revealing a brick wall, and explains that there is another empty flat on the other side.  Later, Coraline visits the other tenants who give her cryptic warnings about the future and against going through that door.  Her excited curiosity now in control of her behavior, Coraline gets the key and opens the door again. This time, though, there is a long hallway, at the end of which is a duplicate version of her home flat, even with an "Other Mother" and "Other Father".  Only these "other parents", along with every other person she encounters there, have black buttons where their eyes would be.  The Other Mother, who turns out to be the dominant entity there, insists that Coraline stay and become one of them.  She flees back home across the door and later finds that her own real parents have disappeared.  She goes back through the door to find and rescue them.  And that's where I'll leave you, the potential reader, to discover the "rest of the story"...

I'm 59 years old, and I thought that Coraline was a scary story...I can't imagine what a little child would think about it!  This book, which won awards for Neil Gaiman, has been adapted into a stop-motion animated film...I saw the trailer, which impressed me.  It's a good story and well-told...I'm just not quite sure about its suitability for youngsters, especially those who harbor fears about strange, scurrying sounds in the darkness of night while they're trying to sleep...