Coraline

Neil Gaiman's Coraline is a properly frightening story for 10 year olds, about a bored girl, a door that should lead nowhere, and a mother with buttons for eyes.

What happens

Coraline's family has moved into part of a big old house. Her parents both work at computers all day and answer her without turning round. Count the doors. List everything blue. Go and pester the neighbours.

So she does. There are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors, and of those doors, thirteen open. The fourteenth is locked.

Her mother unlocks it to prove the point. Behind it is a brick wall.

Everyone in the house warns her. The old man upstairs who trains a mouse circus passes on a message from the mice, and the message is not to go through the door. The two retired actresses downstairs read her tea leaves and tell her she is in terrible danger. Coraline thinks danger sounds rather exciting.

One rainy afternoon she is alone, and she fetches the chair and the broom and gets the keys down off the doorframe.

This time the bricks are gone.

What she finds on the other side is her own flat, only better. Her other mother has cooked something wonderful. Her other father says he is starving. Her other bedroom has toys that move by themselves. Everything is more interesting and everyone is delighted to see her.

They all have big black buttons where their eyes should be.

This is a genuinely scary book and there is no point pretending otherwise. The other mother's fingers are too long and never stop moving. The invitation to stay is accompanied by a plate holding black thread, a silver needle and two buttons. When Coraline says no and goes home, her real parents are simply not there, and she spends the best part of two days on her own, making toast and microwaving a frozen pizza, before she cries herself to sleep in their empty bed at three in the morning.

For a child who finds things under the bed at night, that stretch will be too much. For a child who likes being frightened on purpose, this is one of the best there is, and Coraline herself is the reason. She is calm, rude to the cat, rings the police, and takes an apple in each pocket before she goes back.

A quick word for anyone worried about the story being cruel. It is not. The scariest thing in it wants to love her, which is precisely what makes it awful.

What to read next

If your reader comes out of this wanting more, The Graveyard Book is in the library. Fair warning, it opens with a man walking through a house with a knife, having already killed a family, looking for the baby who got out.