All Spoiler's Book Review: Coraline

 

Hey Fam, 

Welcome to my first All Spoilers Book Review! I have no idea how this is going to go, so it may also be the last, let me know what you think.

This week I want to talk about an amazing book that always gets me right in the place I call the “Discomfort Zone.” I will eventually write a piece about what exactly my Discomfort Zone is, but the TLDR of it is that, as someone who lives with mental illness and pervasive thoughts, who is literally never in a state of comfort, seeing things that are dark, weird, otherworldly, and unsettling actually IS comforting… because it’s a feeling I understand. Things that are dark are welcoming, familiar. The darkness doesn’t stare back, it soothes like cold water on a burn, and lulls me to relaxation in a way I can’t quite explain. But it does. The macabre, the eerie, the deafening quiet, all of it sways in harmony with my weird little Goblin soul. 

Also, if the title didn’t give it away: This post contains SPOILERS. So if you ever plan on reading this book, stop reading this, go read the book, and then come back. It’s that easy. If you aren’t going to read the book anyway but still don’t want spoilers… then there is no making you happy, I guess? 

Also also: I love this book. And Neil Gaiman. Full stop. So even though I make fun of the story it’s just my sense of humor and not anything to do with his ability as a storyteller, which is something I aspire to. Neil, please be my friend!

Now that you understand, let’s move on. 

“I was kidnapped by aliens, they came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.” - Coraline

Oof, same my girl. 

Coraline is the 2002 novella written by the one, the only, Neil Gaiman, about a young girl with workaholic parents who finds herself the lone child in a boarding house filled with folk who can’t even take the time to get her name right and where the most logical voice is a cat that doesn’t give a shit about fuck. 

It’s the end of summer and Coraline is left entirely to her own devices. Our girl only wants three things: 1. For people to not give her a hard time over being a picky eater. B) a goddamn pair of green cloves. And 4. For one of her neighbors to get her goddamn name right. 

Big. Mood. I feel like Coraline and I have a lot in common. 

While she is exploring her new house, Coraline discovers a small door, and behind it is….. A brick wall. Coraline’s mother explains that when the house was divided up into units, this would have been bricked up because it would have gone into the flat next door, which is currently unoccupied. 

To which I ask, “who the hell wants a tiny door to travel around their own house?” before I realize, “Oh, me. I would definitely want that.”

In a move entirely unsurprising because Coraline is a curious goblin child after my own heart, she becomes obsessed with the door and goes to ask her neighbors about it. Her neighbors are Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, two elderly, unmarried women still referred to in the diminutive form of “Miss” and who are, without a doubt in my mind, the very definition of an old lesbian couple. If you don’t agree with me, ask Neil himself, go ahead, I’ll wait. 

Mr Bobo is the upstairs neighbor who is uhhh, taking care of a concerning amount of mice that are not kept in cages. But it’s ok; he is training them for a mouse circus, which is an excuse I tried several times as a child whenever I wanted a ridiculous pet and my mother said “no.” 

Dear Mum: Imagine where I would be if you just let me have twenty giant african land snails. Instead of being a clinically depressed and overly anxious 35 year old changeling I could have been a 35 year old clinically depressed and overly anxious 35 year old with way too many invasive snails. Missed opportunity, if you ask me. 

Now, it is here I need to touch on the kind of rare child Coraline is. She is bored, and instead of slowly driving her inattentive parents into insanity by playing harmless pranks on them like I definitely wouldn’t ever do… she goes around and gets to know her elderly neighbors. What a doll. 

Unfortunately, they are not as cool as Coraline. Calling her “Caroline” right after she introduces herself and being entirely too absorbed in their own weirdness to hold a normal conversation. Despite the fact that her neighbors can barely seem to pay attention to anything, they somehow recognize in their own way that Coraline is in danger. After reading her tea leaves, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible give her a hag stone, with Spink telling her that it is “good for bad things, sometimes” and Forcible correcting her, says the stone is “good for lost things.” 

I mean, I’d just be happy to get a cool rock… 

Whichever it is, Coraline got a genuine hag stone and I am jealous. All my neighbors ever did growing up was yell at me for being a nightmare child. 

Mr Bobo (who ABSOLUTELY smells like mouse pee and you cannot convince me otherwise) also tells her that the rodent infestation he refuses to curtail wants her to be wary of the door, giving her nothing except exposure to disease and an equally unhealthy desire to do the exact opposite and open it again. 

Coraline opens the door, finds a new loving and attentive family. Hilarity ensues. Coraline is happy. The end. 

Just kidding. On the other side of the door is a veritable nightmare sandwich of horrors that will make you stop reading, examine the cover, and confirm that this book is intended for children 8-12 years old. 

As a certified creepy kid, I was totally fine with this book when I was younger. It didn’t give me nightmares or anything, but I do need to direct your attention back to my Discomfort Zone speech at the beginning. Ya girl has never been ok, so don’t take my experience of reading this book under my covers at night with a flashlight when I was definitely supposed to be sleeping and pretending to be asleep every time I heard my mum come up the hallway because she knew I was up to some bullshit and reading way past bedtime… Haha, mum, if you’re reading this… HI MA! 

Coraline finds The Other Mother and The Other Father, who look like her parents, but also sort of don’t. The Other Mother is thin and spindly, almost spider-like, with short black hair that floats around as if caught in its own breeze, and long red nails that are like claws. The Other Father is like her real father but appearing to be caring and interested in her, but when the Other Mother isn’t around he does not speak, only occupying his office and not working. You can tell the bar is set real high here, because all he really needs to do is acknowledge Coraline and she’s like “oh damn, I think I like this dude even though he is kinda unsetting and has big black buttons sewn into where his eyes should be.”

OH YEAH. Everyone on the other side of the door has black buttons sewn into their eyeballs. 

This is a children’s story after all…

See, my creepy child self read this and was like “Oh sweet, how do I get black buttons for eyes?” but fun contact lenses were pretty garbage back then and pretty much just like putting tissue paper in your eyes and then crying when it wouldn’t come out, having a panic attack because you keep having to touch your eyeball with your grimy kid fingers, and eventually the sobbing would wash them out of your eyes and down the drain. I definitely did not write that from experience. Stop looking at me like that- 

MOVING ON. 

The Other Mother LOVES Coraline, and really wants her to stay, offering her very own special set of black button eyes if she does. Even offering her another colour if she doesn’t want black. 

Again, where do I sign up???

This is where I reminded myself that the Beldam would have absolutely got me, because big, glossy, inky black buttons? For eyes? THE AESTHETIC! THE OPTIONS! 

Sidenote: This is where I take a moment to say if you never finished chapter five… Emily… maybe do it so we can talk about this amazing book at work like we keep meaning to and THEN you can go ahead and read that copy of Good Omens I got you for your birthday last week and we can talk about that too. No pressure! 

Thankfully, Coraline is smarter than I, and she returns home and locks the door. 

ALWAYS LOCK YOUR DOORS, PEOPLE.

Only to find her parents are gone. They don’t come home that night, or the next day. Lost, Coraline turns to the only adult in the room, the black cat that wanders the property, who leads her to a mirror in the hall where she sees her parents. Trapped, and writing “help us” on the glass. 

Coraline calls the cops, who like every other adult in the book, weirdly doesn’t take her seriously when she tells them that her parents went missing after she went through a tiny door that usually leads to a brick wall but then it didn’t so she went through and met creepy people with rad AF button eyes and then came back to find her parents trapped in a mirror. 

So Coraline decides her only option is to throw down a beat down with the Other Mother. 

Terrified, because she’s a child and this is a children’s book, Coraline goes back through the door and finds the black cat in the garden where, good lord, he can speak. The cat tells her that, basically, since cats can do whatever the hell they want, he can just come to this other world if he feels like it. It makes sense, any cat owner knows that the rules of everything from gravity to inter-dimensional travel just do not apply to the average domesticated feline. Also cats don’t have names because they aren’t into weak-ass bullshit, and since they know who they are down to their very core, have no need of one. 

To which I say, “jokes on you cat. If I found you I would name you Lil Pickles and, since you’re a cat and don’t have thumbs, you can’t stop me.”

He tells her to challenge the Other Mother to a game in order to free her parents. But instead of doing that, Coraline decides to flat out refuse the Other Mother’s offer and gets locked in a mirror herself. But it’s cool, she isn’t alone in the space behind the mirror because she finds THE GHOSTS OF THREE DEAD CHILDREN. 

Ages 8-12. Don’t worry about it, kids are resilient or whatever. 

Coraline learns from the ghost kids that they let the Other Mother, who they call the Beldam, sew the button eyes on. But she eventually got bored with them, and let them die, and they linger in the mirror because she stole their souls. Coraline vows to save them and bring them back. 

Also, I’m pretty sure one of the dead kids is either wearing a very VERY good costume or is actually a fairy. Considering that the Beldam is able to create pocket dimensions and is decidedly not human, I’m going with the latter. 

When she is released from the mirror, Coraline does what the cat originally told her to do and challenges the Other Mother to a game: If she can locate her parents, and the souls of the three dead kids in the mirror, Coraline gets to go home and everything goes back to normal. If she fails, she must accept the eyeball buttons and stay with the Other Mother, looking metal as fuck forever… or at least until the Other Mother takes her soul and lets her die like the others. 

Sounds like an okay time to me.

Pretty early on, Coraline notices a snow globe on the fireplace mantle, because the entire house is a mirror image (lots of mirrors in this-here book) and the only thing that exists here that does not exist in the real world is the snow globe… tuck that nugget away for later.

Not wanting to give the Other Mother any inclination that she is intelligent, Coraline looks for the souls of the three kids and, because this is a children’s book, finds them in increasingly horrific places. Looking through the hole in the hag stone, Coraline finds the first in the bottom of a toybox, ok, this one isn’t so bad. The second she finds in the apartment of Other Miss Forcible and Miss Spink, within a flesh sack containing a delightful parody of some parasitic conjoined twin creature with two heads and many arms, in one of the creature’s hands. 

With the discovery of each soul, Coraline sees the Other World falling apart more and more. The Other Mother offers to help her at this point, giving her a bass key to the empty flat that she conveniently keeps in her goddamn mouth. Coraline knows it is a trap, but not wanting to let the Other Mother see her hand, she goes into the empty flat. 

In the basement where she is greeted by a foul odor and sees a foot sticking out from under a bunch of curtains. Pulling them aside she finds the Other Father, whose body has swelled up so that he looks like a grub with buttons for eyes. One button falls away and Coraline feels pity for the Other Father for all of ten seconds before he warns her that the Other Mother is controlling him, and is ‘pushing’ him to attack her. Being a badass, Coraline rips the other button eye off, leaving the Grub Father with one less sense to use against her. It feels around for her and she manages to avoid it, until she starts to climb the stairs. He lunges for her and she manages to slam the door in its face. 

Then there is only one place left to look, and Coraline goes up to Mr Bobo’s apartment to see what nightmare fuel waits up there. Upon opening the door she is greeted by the rats singing a song…

Because of course they’re singing… singing with DISEASE. But really, Bobo needs help from a professional, and not just an exterminator. 

“But Rune, it’s just an old guy who likes rodents” I hear ye say. 

To which I respond, “Ahh, sweet summer childe, just ye wait. Just ye wait.”

The rat singing draws her toward the bedroom in the apartment, and it is on the way there that she remembers the snow globe and how weird it is that everything is a mirror of the real world except that trinket… 

Kinda obvious, if you ask me, but I’m not a soul-sucking creature as old as time that creates pocket dimensions that are just spiderwebs to trap children. What do I know about subtlety? 

Nothing. The answer is literally nothing. ANYWAY. 

In the bedroom Coraline finds the huddled shape of Mr Bobo in his coat, and looking through the stone sees the last soul is in his chest. Not wanting to waste anymore time, she reaches for it when Mr Bobo explodes into hundreds of rats. 

Yeah, he was just hundreds of rats in a man suit, and I just screamed into a pillow. 

For the record, I have nothing against rats, mice, or any rodent. I do, however, have a crippling fear of infestation animals, and homeboy’s unchecked population of attic rats, erm, sorry, circus rats, makes me want to harf.

So he is a bunch of rats and Coraline is a bunch of over this shit. Seeing that the biggest of the rats is carrying the last dead kid’s soul, she gives chase, only to fall at the bottom of the stairs and skin her knees. She loses the juicy rat boi and realizes she has failed the dead kids and herself. Coraline begins crying, because she’s a kid and it’s effing justified at this point, when she sees the cat bringing her a headless rat… y’know, normal cat stuff. Soul still in its diseased little paws. 

Coraline hears the voice of the last kid, telling her that the Other Mother will never let her leave, at the same time the cat tells her that the Other Mother has sealed all the entrances and exits to the Other World. But it’s cool, Coraline has a plan! 

Carrying the cat into the house, she finds the Other Mother by the small door, in the same room as the fireplace with the VERY OBVIOUS snow globe on it. 

I mean… come on, Beldam, you couldn’t make it like, a toothpick stuck under a baseboard or the shriveled remains of a bit of orange peel that fell on the floor and then ‘accidentally’ got kicked under the fridge? It’s fine, it’s FINE. Don’t worry, the Beldam has been doing this for a very, Very, V E R Y long time and would absolutely not make such a rookie mistake as putting her parents inside a goddamn snow globe that is literally the first thing Coraline would have seen after crossing through the tiny door. 

Oh wait, shit, no. That’s absolutely what she did. 

Coraline, being a goddamn legend, knows there is no way home unless the Other Mother lets her out. So, being the crafty little scamp she is, Coraline tells the Other Mother that she knows, without a doubt, that her parents are trapped in the passage between the real world and the Other World. Thinking that she has won, Other Mother opens the small door, laughing at her victory over a child. 

Coraline, carrying her ‘friend’ the cat, and I am using friend very loosely here because I think he might have downgraded her to acquaintance after this whole incident… throws the fucking cat who saved her ass into the Other Mother’s scary spider face. 

Yes. 

While the Other Mother is dealing with a bad case of cat-face, Coraline grabs the snowglobe and books it for the passage. She and the cat make it back to the real world, and with the help of the ghost kids, they close the door, cutting off the Other Mother’s hand in the process. Safe in her own world, Coraline and the cat fall asleep, and are awakened by her real mother, who tells her dinner will be ready shortly. 

Coraline, being a girl after my own heart, changes into her pajamas before dinner, because you need them comfy pants to eat properly, and uses a bit of string to tie the key to the small door around her neck for safe keeping. After dinner, she falls asleep and has a dream picnic with the kids she saved, before they depart for whatever afterlife awaits them. 

The end. 

Nah, the ghost kids warn her that shit isn’t over and Coraline awakens to scratching at her bedroom door, sounding like a rat with an extra leg. Shudder. Opening the door, she sees that it is the severed hand of the Other Mother after the key. The hand keeps moving around the house at night, scaring the mice infestation upstairs and scratching at her window while she tries to sleep. Finally, Coraline realizes that if she doesn’t do something she will never be safe from the hand. 

The next morning, Coraline asks her mother for a sheet for a doll tea party, and gets a paper table cloth. Using the paper tablecloth to cover the mouth of an old well on the property and using the dolls and teacups around the edge to hold it in place, she returns to the house where she flaunts the key openly while proclaiming to the old lesbian ladies that she is going to play in the meadow. To which they probably say something like “We smell like mothballs and definitely have a bowl of those weird candies that every old person has that are probably licorice but no one actually knows what they taste like because there is nary a one that isn’t 30 years old and solid as a rock.”

Back at the well, she places the key carefully in the center of the tablecloth and begins to host a tea party for the dolls. The hand, not having a brain, because it’s a hand, does a zoom and goes for the key, which it gets, but also pulls the paper tablecloth, the dolls and the toy teacups down into the well. Coraline then puts wooden planks over the mouth of the well and goes home, aware that something like the hand and the Beldam can never truly be vanquished forever. 

Back at the house Mr Bobo tells her that the mice are nearly ready for their musical debut, which sounds like a neat time to Coraline. No judgment, I like watching Hallmark movies and making up sub plots about serial killers and bodies in the walls. Do you, I guess. 

Oh, it is at this point that Coraline learns that his name is Mr Bobo and that she had never learned it until now. Meanwhile she was super cheesed that he kept getting her name wrong. 

Glass houses and all that, Coraline.

Coraline returns the hag stone to the old lesbians and goes to bed that night, unafraid of starting at a new school the next day, knowing no adolescent shit could be scarier than the creepy musical rodent infestation in her house, and the what-the-fuck on the other side of the little door. 

The End!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

So Coraline from start to finish is a weird, dark, and fantastical tale that could have only been told properly by Neil Gaiman. He has a unique talent for translating vulnerability and common strangeness into a narrative that feels like it is at once being told by the child in question and also a ten-thousand-year-old eldritch soul. Is there any doubt that he is one of my favorites?

At its heart this is a coming of age story that deals with more than just coming to terms with life and the inevitable loss of innocence all children on the edge of teenagerhood experience. Coraline learns what it means to be afraid, and then to do the brave thing regardless of the fear. 

“‘Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.’”

This story also touches on the idea of powerlessness. When her parents don’t return home, Coraline goes to bed by herself, and wakes up still lacking the people who protect and provide for her. When she is going after the last soul, and she falls down, the rat escapes and the realization that she has failed dawns on her. Because once the Beldam wins, Coraline will never escape. 

The powerlessness of childhood is something we all understand but don’t really talk about. Ultimately being in an environment that is not of our choosing, subject to the wills of those responsible for you, and being denied those little moments of personal freedom and expression. In Coraline’s case it is a pair of green gloves that she sees at the shops, but her mother denies her, buying her boring oversized school clothes that she will grow into instead. 

Coraline is also powerless to get the attention of her busy parents, and to get her neighbors to say her name right. Something which, in the end, she realizes she has also done to Mr Bobo. Does that mean that Coraline was also just as caught up in her own little world as the weird adults surrounding her? Perhaps, but I think this is a nod to her growing up and understanding that there isn’t much of a difference between her pre-teen self and the grown-ups around her.

The family dynamic is a difficult one, because there are so many kinds of families. Coraline’s parents are… inattentive at best, but change when she rescues them from the mirror. However, while they don’t appear to remember being saved, they do become more interested in speaking to her, and playing with her. But at the same time, Coraline also learns to appreciate them, their faults and their quirks. Humans aren’t perfect, we can lose sight of what is important because there is something more distracting and stressful getting in the way. A la capitalism. I don’t think her parents did it on purpose. I do think that they got lost while trying to do their best, and then got lost again in the mirror. 

Speaking of mirrors…

Mirrors play a huge role in this story. The Beldam creates a mirror world, a mockery of Coraline’s life that is vivid and alluring, but filled with enough uncanny valley nonsense that she knows isn’t right. No matter what the Beldam does, it will never be any more than a twisted approximation of the kind of life Coraline could desire. The problem is, that no matter how perfect the world is, when you offer someone all the things they have ever wanted in exchange for letting them sew buttons into your eye holes, you end up with a world even more boring than the one Coraline came from. 

“I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?”

What then indeed, Coraline.

Part of growing up is learning to understand things like family and the difference between want and need. Coraline could have accepted a life free of her parents where she was able to eat all the microwave pizzas she could ever want. Except that she couldn’t, because the pizzas would run out, and she would have no money to buy more. She needs her parents, she loves them. 

I’m not an apologist for inattentive parents, but I do see how it can be easy to become distracted by the rat race of trying to give your family the best life, only to lose sight of what really matters in a family. 

Building off that, I agree with Coraline that the Other Mother does love her in “her own selfish way.” But the love that the Other Mother was willing to give was just another form of inattention. When you give someone everything they want, simply because they want it, in exchange for their unwavering love and devotion, that is… well… not taking the time to learn how to make the other person truly happy, it isn’t quality time and the exchange of admiration and respect. It is a hollow thing that, while it would seem very tempting for a child, is not designed to last. 

Really, I think that is what came through for me the most in this book. 

You know, besides the nightmare sandwich of mental images that still haunt me and yet somehow helped me become the goblin of a woman I am today.

I love you Neil Gaiman, call me.

It isn’t always about fighting for what you want, it can also be about fighting for what you need. Like structure in childhood, the push and pull of growing up and earning your identity and place in a household. Ultimately, coming to terms with the vulnerability and powerlessness of childhood, and how we eventually begin to outgrow it and learn to take care of ourselves. 

Overall, I give Coraline a 9/10. I wish it was longer, I would love an even more adult horror version of this story but I still think it is dang near perfect for my taste. 

So Fam, how did I do with this one? Did you like the All Spoilers Book Review? I have to admit that this is not something I am entirely practiced in, and I’m sure that shows. But we are here to learn and to have fun and I thought, since this is a text medium, we could explore this book together and maybe have a laugh. 

Peace, love, and mothman.

-R