Coraline

in the film. She’d moved from somewhere in England to Oregon now, and the house she was in was called The Pink Palace.
    ‘That’s my house,’ I told Henry.
    And it was. Henry Selick’s Pink Palace was the house I live in now, turret and porch and all. None of us are quite sure how that happened. But it seemed strangely appropriate for a book that was started for one daughter in one house and finished for another in another house.
    The book was published in 2002, and people liked it. It won awards. More importantly than that, it worked, at least for some people.
    I’d wanted to write a story for my daughters that told them something I wished I’d known when I was a boy: that being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.
    So now, ten years later, I’ve started running into women who tell me that Coraline got them through hard times in their lives. That when they were scared they thought of Coraline, and they did the right thing anyway.
    And that, more than anything, makes it all worthwhile.
    Chris Riddell has done a new set of illustrations for this tenth anniversary edition. I looked at the picture he had done for the cover and was amazed and delighted by the way that he had combined both of the houses – the one I live in now, the one I lived in then.
     
    Neil Gaiman

 
    Coraline, who was standing in the doorway,  cast a huge and distorted shadow . . .

Chapter 1
    Coraline discovered the door a little while after they moved into the house.
    It was a very old house – it had an attic under the roof and a cellar under the ground and an overgrown garden with huge old trees in it.
    Coraline’s family didn’t own all of the house, it was too big for that. Instead they owned part of it.
    There were other people who lived in the old house.
    Miss Spink and Miss Forcible lived in the flat below Coraline’s, on the ground floor. They were both old and round, and they lived in their flat with a number of ageing Highland terriers who had names like Hamish and Andrew and Jock. Once upon a time Miss Spink and Miss Forcible had been actresses, as Miss Spink told Coraline the first time she met her.
    ‘You see, Caroline,’ Miss Spink said, getting Coraline’s name wrong, ‘both myself and Miss Forcible were famous actresses, in our time. We trod the boards, lovey. Oh, don’t let Hamish eat the fruitcake, or he’ll be up all night with his tummy.’
    ‘It’s Coraline. Not Caroline. Coraline,’ said Coraline.
    In the flat above Coraline’s, under the roof, was a crazy old man with a big moustache. He told Coraline that he was training a mouse circus. He wouldn’t let anyone see it.
    ‘One day, little Caroline, when they are all ready, everyone in the whole world will see the wonders of my mouse circus. You ask me why you cannot see it now. Is that what you asked me?’
    ‘No,’ said Coraline quietly, ‘I asked you not to call me Caroline. It’s Coraline.’
    ‘The reason you cannot see the mouse circus,’ said the man upstairs, ‘is that the mice are not yet ready and rehearsed. Also, they refuse to play the songs I have written for them. All the songs I have written for the mice to play go oompah oompah . But the white mice will only play toodle oodle , like that. I am thinking of trying them on different types of cheese.’
    Coraline didn’t think there really was a mouse circus. She thought the old man was probably making it up.
    The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring.
    She explored the garden. It was a big garden: at the very back was an old tennis court, but no one in the house played tennis and the fence around the court had holes in it and the net had mostly rotted away; there was an old rose garden, filled with stunted, flyblown rose bushes; there was a rockery that was all rocks; there was a fairy ring, made of squidgy brown toadstools which smelled dreadful if you accidentally trod on them.
    There was also a well. On the first day Coraline’s family moved in, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly.
    She found it on the third day, in an overgrown meadow beside the tennis court, behind a clump of trees – a low brick circle almost hidden in the high grass. The well had been