As I re-read this, I asked myself, "If this was considered one of the most frighting books by the New York Times, then why?"
This is Neil Gaiman’s first fantasy book for children, but adults quickly.” absorbed the plot. The New York Times Book Review said it was “One of the most frightening books ever written.” Considering the body of scary books available, this seems like a pretty bold statement, but it is a testimony to Gaiman’s writing skills with this plot.
Coraline Jones and her family’s new home is an old house divided into flats. The space above and below has unusual tenants. The two lady tenants give them to give her a cup of tea and a unique piece of wood with a hole that you look through the special hole in it. The man above them, Mr. Bobo, has some trained outstanding warn Coraline never to go through the door. She sets out to explore and finds that the door returns to be just a door alone, and she opens it again, only to find a dark hall which walls behind it. The divided house is a terrifying house that evolves.
Evenmatter-of-fact,s back to the door alone and opens it again to find a dark hall, which she walks right into. What quickly looks like a terrifying situation is met with a matter-of-fact unquestioning approach, but Coraline tells us how she needs to act “to be brave.”
The long hallway leads to a parallel world where she becomes trapped,d. Gaiman excels in his descriptive writing of this other world, complete with “other parents” with large button eyes, and learns that her real parents have been stolen and hidden, and she finds what is left of three young children who were trapped there and had their souls stolen and hidden.
Her cat somehow makes it to this place, but it can talk in this world and is a help. Alive in a dark closet with the three soulless children, she decides to free her parents and then lost souls by challenging her not-mother to a contest,
The contest is another mother's struggle, but she finally gets back and saves her parents and the lost children, who can live alone. Even safe in the real world, she learns that her other mother has sent a severed hand to get the door key from her. She eventually overcomes that threat. Her parents seem to pay more attention to her after all this has happened, but they don’t remember what happened to them.
It seems less likely that the book's plot is designed to solve the children's problems of being ignored than it is to be scary. It works.
