Coraline & Other Stories

I saw the stop-motion animated film that Henry Selick did of Coraline and man I thought it was weird and twisted in a semi-delightful sort of way. The story itself, written by Neil Gaiman lends itself perfectly to that subgenre of Burton-esque family movies, indeed the Coraline trailer I remember used the music from Nightmare Before Christmas and many people thought Tim Burton had done it because it boasted “from the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas…” Being the Burton nerd I am, I knew they meant Henry Selick. 

Gaiman’s twisted tales in this collection of short stories are pretty great, but I did find them a bit too much like children’s books for my liking. At first I found it really hard to get into, but after 50-70 pages or so the black shining magic started to take some spectral shape. 

After moving to a new house young Coraline sets out exploring, discovering that an ideal version of her own frustrating family lurks behind a mysterious door in the living room. Whilst the first visit is all smiles and good food, the second reveals some dark and scary secrets. Amongst the other adventures this books offers is that of Private dick Jack Horner solving the mystery of who pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall, the attempts of a bridge troll to eat a boy’s life, an old woman’s discovery of the Holy Grail, and the attempts of two boys to talk to girls at a party, discovering that they might not be girls after all. 

I say that these are really more children’s tales than anything else because they are very simply written. However, this is not to say that the Gaiman quirks and twists don’t shine out on more than one occasion. Each story deals with darker themes and more often than not actually makes light of very dark settings and characters. One such tale is set in a graveyard and the Living are depicted as the villains and the people to be feared. I sort of like how Gaiman humanizes the inanimate or inhuman, breathes this sort of sweet life into it, and then shows it to us in a whole different way than we’ve ever seen it before, making the dark and the scary seem less so. 

There is still great imagery that comes with his prose, you can literally picture everything and even see yourself there in the mix. 

As the for the offbeat quirk that shines through, the second story entitled The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds takes all these classic nursery rhymes like ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’, ‘Humpty Dumpty’, ‘Little Jack Horner’ and more and fuses them all together to make this really entertaining and delightfully quirky pulp fiction/gangster noir type story: we’re talking Mother Hubbard as an Underworld figure and Humpty Dumpty was rubbed out. That particular story I found highly entertaining and clever! 

Filled with action, adventure, some nice moral messages, drama, and comedy, Coraline & Other Stories is a nice little collection of intriguing tales, but they would seem more wondrous to a younger readership, I just felt that they a bit too simple and kid-ish for me.