Coraline

“Coraline” by Neil Gaiman is one of the darkest children’s books I’ve ever read (trumped slightly by Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book”). The novel pulls from a lot of different sources, resulting in a children’s story that reads more like an uncut Grimm fairytale.

A lot of Gaiman’s children’s fiction kind of makes you do a literary double take; at first it seems pretty normal until he throws in that extra sentence (or some sort of grisly murder) that makes you stop for a second to realize what’s going on. Example: Coraline lives in an old house, with a door to another world. Cute! Enchanting! …And in the other world lives a bedlam that collects the souls of dead children after she’s cut out their eyes and trapped them in the walls.

He layers oddity upon oddity until you get the most quietly gruesome, twisted stories imaginable. Of course, this really just makes me love his stories. I might not have been the kid at 8 or 10 who would’ve enjoyed his children’s books, but I really wish I’d been. In his talk at MIT, he mentioned that kids often want the most ultimate kinds of justice, that they want the most satisfying ends, and that they can definitely handle the rougher stories. I often told my friends and family that he was the worst children’s author in the world, but I have to say, he really makes a point by saying that you don’t need to stuff children’s literature full of unicorns and candy to be suitable. Throughout history, children’s stories have been insanely grizzly; Grimm, Anderson and Perrault were no Dr. Seusses. If you told your kid the original Little Red Riding Hood, there’s no way he/she would stray off the path or stay out after dark. Because they’d be eaten. And that’s all. No woodsmen to save them in the original story; in some versions, the kid doesn’t even get to grandma’s house at all. She talks to a strange wolf, then gets eaten.

So in many ways, Neil Gaiman is just returning to cautionary storytelling. Coraline is fussy, impatient and ungrateful, and the story leads her to discover how to be thankful for the life she’s been given. Gaiman is pretty tame by historical standards, since his protagonists (nearly) always end up happy or sometimes with a better life than they started with. The journey can sometimes be rough and incredibly dark, but the aspect of danger and adventure is often a driving force in a story trying to teach a lesson.