Coraline
By Neil Gaiman

Delving into the depths of obscurity.                                                                                  
The simple act of opening a door. One of the most cliched story beginnings around.

Yet British author Neil Gaiman, with his innate knack for putting the darkest of humour and the most twisted of allusions into his many best-selling works, manages to transform Coraline's somewhat passe exposition into a deliciously haunting novel fraught with hidden innuendo and elusive complexities. Yes, and it's funny, too.

It starts off with a young, witty, spunky girl named Coraline (not Caroline, as she keeps insisting), who discovers a carved, wooden door at the far corner of the drawing room shortly after moving into an old house with rather bizarre characters living above and below. The door leads to a mirrored world, where she finds a twisted version of the world she is used to. Everything is familiar, only it is somehow frighteningly different. She meets her 'other mother' and 'other father', two incredibly odd characters with buttons for eyes, paper-white skin and a sinister reluctance for Coraline to leave. Everything appears to be perfect in her little alternate universe-at the beginning. Coraline soon comes to find that not everything is as remarkable as it seems. As she falls deeper into her world behind the door, everything becomes a little more horrible, a little more eerie, a little more unfamiliar.

Neil Gaiman's Coraline is one of those rare novels that manages to convey darkness, fear and nightmares without gruesome characters and done-to-death plots.  It sends a little shiver down the spine, keeping its narrative just a fingertip away from bone-chilling, primarily because Gaiman keeps Coraline's subtle power hidden behind a large smokescreen. Its diction and descriptions remain, as always, succinct and impeccable. However, the real pulling power of this novel lies in its inexplicable depth of subject, eerie tone and taut prose. Not to mention the equally memorable illustrations by Gaiman's accomplice McKean. Despite all this, it would do well to remember that Coraline is a children's book and is therefore rather short, simply-written and lacking in the profound issues and intensity of some of Gaiman's books for adults.

Coraline-it's intangible. It's a book of veils and layers; nothing is ever truly there. Really. Try it. For those of you who are tired of waiting for the next Harry Potter novel, this is the book for you.