Coraline Jones is bored. With this simple premise, Coraline by Neil Gaiman shares a beginning with children’s stories from C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia to Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always.

The novella follows the titular protagonist as unending rain, unsympathetic parents, and unimaginable boredom inspire her to explore her surroundings. As many young heroes and heroines before her can attest, this urge yields both great adventure and great danger for young Coraline.

The upstairs and downstairs neighbors aren’t nearly entertaining enough for Coraline: Miss Spink and Miss Forcible are slightly loony has-been stage actresses living with their spoiled Scottie dogs, and Mr. Bobo is a “crazy old man” upstairs assembling his own mouse circus. It’s not just Coraline’s parents that don’t seem to understand her; all of these new neighbors call her “Caroline”, no matter how many times she corrects them.

But one day, Coraline finds the key to the locked door in the family’s empty drawing room. And on the other side, she finds…a house exactly like her own with the same rooms, the same furniture, even down to the man and woman who call themselves her “other” father and mother.

The only differences are that these “other” parents dote on Coraline, give her whatever she wants…and have buttons stitched onto their faces in the place of eyes. Yet every time she visits her “other” home, she notices more and more unsettling differences. Meanwhile, her “other” parents become more insistent on Coraline staying on their side of the door, and she can’t help but notice the hungry expressions in their black, button eyes.

Then, Coraline’s real parents disappear, and the line between these two worlds becomes dangerously blurred. After that, it’s up to Coraline to fight her “other” mother and win back her real parents.

Neil Gaiman, author of many award-winning books for both adults and children, creates the timeless tone of Grimm’s fairy tales with simple sentences, never getting bogged down in extraneous detail or elaborate phrasing. Coraline is suggested for children ages eight and up, as even though the language is accessible, the story has some disturbing passages and themes.

It’s this simplicity which also makes Coraline one of the creepiest books I have read in a long time. There is the quietly conveyed sense of things moving in the darkness of the margins on every page. As Coraline walks through the secret door for the first time, for example, the narrator notes, “There was a cold, musty smell coming through the open doorway: it smelled like something very old and very slow.”

The vagueness of the dangers which threaten the protagonist places the reader squarely in Coraline’s bright orange boots, enveloping the reader in Gaiman’s world.

One of the most potent sources of the book’s power to unsettle is how the familiar becomes the unfamiliar and how Coraline’s own home is transformed into something strange and perilous. Gaiman clearly understands that bizarre monsters and violence can be scary, but the subtlety of the not-quite-right often strikes a deeper chord with readers. One of the eeriest moments is when Coraline runs through the tunnel to embrace her mother at the other end:

“Coraline was too close to stop, and she felt the other mother’s cold arms enfold her. She stood there, rigid and trembling as the other mother held her tightly” and the other mother talks to her in a voice “so close to her real mother’s that Coraline could scarcely tell them apart.”

Gaiman has drawn heavily from the traditional fairy tale to provide the basis for his story. Coraline’s tale resembles many English and Irish folktales of children lured into the fairy realm, and details like the presence of a ring of toadstools and the “other” mother’s predilection for games are time-honored elements of fairy stories.

Yet the connection is never made explicit, the closest the narrative getting is when the other mother is referred to as the “beldam”, creating a possible link to the enchanting fairy woman from Keats’ poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. Even without these elements, Gaiman expertly blends classic folklore with emotions that any modern child (or adult, for that matter) can relate to.

The novella begins with the following epigraph by G.K. Chesterton: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” In Chesterton’s words, then, Gaiman has told a modern fairy tale which is vibrantly “more than true.” In the classically fairy-tale tradition, Coraline is inspiring and ultimately uplifting.

First published in 2002, Coraline has won a number of children’s book awards, both in the United Kingdom and in the United States, and has recently been made into a movie by Focus Features. While technically a children’s story, the narrative is so well-constructed that all ages will enjoy this chilling fairy tale.