Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Series: Standalone
Published by Harper Collins on 2003 November 11
Genres: Fantasy, Horror
Pages: 4
Format: Audiobook
Source: Borrowed from Public Library
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The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring....
In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close.
The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own.
Only it's different.
At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind-up angels that flutter around the bedroom, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer, little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go.
Other children are trapped there as well, lost souls behind the mirrors. Coraline is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight with all her wits and all the tools she can find if she is to save the lost children, her ordinary life, and herself.
Neil Gaiman really has a way with words. Coraline is such a very short audiobook but nonetheless, Gaiman’s words and how he narrated the whole story still made me shivered with wonder as I listened to it. Just like The Graveyard Book, Coraline is brimming with a creeptastic vibe that will immediately pull you in into the world.
Coraline’s setting seemed simplistic at first since the house where Caroline and her parents moved was somewhat normal… the next door neighbours seemed normal, too. But as the story progressed, everything is not what it seems to be as there’s a lurking terror (also called as a Beldam and the Other Mother) hiding in the depths of the large house and it’s playing a game with its tenants. Unfortunately, Coraline, our heroine and an ordinary girl who’s just worrying about the color of her rain boots became the center of such a game. She suddenly found her parents acting weird and declaring over the top affections for her which was not normal at all.
Everything just became straight up eerie once Coraline pledged to play the Beldam’s game of hide and seek. And while I get spooked with all the singing and the music background incorporated in the audiobook, I was egging Coraline to outwit the Other Mother because there’s just no way I’d be able to sleep if the little girl gets transformed into a translucent spider. And at the same time, you are silently praying for the Other Mother to make things harder for Coraline because you’re not yet ready for the story to finish. Heh.
I don’t think that I’d ever get tired of listening to Neil Gaiman’s voice and his talent for narration as these greatly enhances the magic of his writing and the words it convey. And with Coraline, Neil has just proven that every book can be as magical, charming, and at the same time spooky as long as you’re working on it.