Coraline: Because peaceful sleep is too easy

Since I don't have to take literature courses anymore, I am free to read books that I want to read, without having to keep in mind what my thesis on post-structural queer theory analysis on Marxist themes will be. Reading for pleasure! The concept is amazing.

The most recent of the many books I had the pleasure, for once, to read, was Neil Gaiman's Coraline. I had this one on my books-to-read-before-life-is-consumed-by-Grand-Theft-Auto list for a while. I decided to finally read it when I learned that it was being adapted to film by Henry Selick, the same stop-motion artist who did The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Coraline has been compared to Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland, an obvious connection. Both Coraline and Alice, find themselves taken from relative normalcy through a tunnel into another dimension. Though, to be more accurate, Coraline is a much more formidable opponent to the obstacles that stand in her way, more tenacious, considering the frightening environment she finds herself in.

Honestly, Coraline is Alice in Wonderland, if instead of falling down a rabbit hole in world of hallucinogen-induced weirdos and subtle allusions to drugs, Alice found herself in a psychological conniption fit of an alternate dimension in which your parental doppelgangers eat live beetles, suck out your soul to leave you an empty husk, and are willing to give you everything you could want for the small price of sowing buttons into your eye sockets.

Did I mention that this is a children's novel?

And say what you like about the Queen of Hearts, her authoritarianism doesn't match the twisted sickness of Coraline's antagonist, the Other Mother. The illustrations by Dave McKean serve to show her unsettling nature (she has BUTTONS FOR EYES, for christ's sakes), but it's in Gaiman's descriptions of her arachnid attempt at a human form that make you wish you hadn't read this before going to bed.

The funny thing is that the writing style in Coraline is clearly for a younger audience. The prose is simple and you can easily get through the book in an evening. But, Gaiman manages to tap into those childlike fears that, as an adult, you had forgotten you still had, likely because you know that they're nonsense. But, he's convincing enough and talented enough to suspend your disbelief so that you'll once again be thinking that there are multi-eyed monsters under the bed, monkeys with flamethrowers in the toilet plumbing, or rhinocegators in the vegetable crisper.

I'm hoping the movie version can keep this tone, but I doubt it. Not that Henry Selick is a bad director—quite the opposite, I think. But, what makes Coraline so fucked-up creepy is your own imagination getting carried away. Film, unfortunately, never leaves much to the imagination.