I read the book when it was first published, back in 2002. This year it was republished as a graphic novel, illustrated by Craig Russell.

Coraline and her parents have recently moved into a big old house. One rainy day, when it’s raining too hard for Coraline to explore the grounds, she decides to explore the inside of the house. She finds a door that goes to the other side of the house, where everything is fun. She finds her “other mother” and “other father” there, who are just like her parents except they are always happy to see her – and they have black buttons for eyes. They’d love to have her stay there forever. There’s only one catch: she would have to get black button eyes, too.

A child’s dream come true – “why couldn’t my parents always be nice and always have time for me?”. But as always in fairy tales, everything has a cost.

Coraline decides she doesn’t want black button eyes and comes back to her own side of the house, where discovers that the other mother has somehow stolen her real parents. So she returns to the other side in order to find them and bring them back.

It’s funny and spooky-scary and very well written, as all of Gaiman’s books. And Coraline is a great character, an unusually sensible and brave child protagonist, despite the lack of magical powers or grand quests.

The illustrated version is nice, but as often happens, it has lost a good part of its horror compared to the original. When reading a book, my imagination provides its own versions of the scary possibilities and spooky places and situations. Inevitably someone else’s pictures of the same thing are less frightening. Words are for me more powerful than pictures – I’d rather have a thousand words than one picture.

But I am looking forward to the stop-motion film coming out next year (trailer).

See a preview of the book at HarperCollins.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.