Kid Goth -
Neil Gaiman’s fantasies.
by Dana Goodyear in The New Yorker, January 25, 2010

Gaiman’s “Coraline” was first thought too frightening for children. Now, he says, it’s a “beloved text.” Author photograph, below right, by Eric Ogden.

In “The New Mother,” a children’s story published by Lucy Clifford in 1882, two previously well-behaved little girls turn so bad—dousing the fire and breaking the clock and dancing on the butter—that their mother is forced to go away, and a new mother, a demon with two glass eyes and a horrible wooden tail, comes to take her place. At the story’s end, the girls flee to the forest to live; they miss their mother terribly and long in vain for the chance to redeem themselves.

Sometimes, at night, they sneak back to their old cottage, where through the window they can see the glint of the new mother’s glass eyes.
Gothic horror was thoroughly out of fashion in children’s literature when, in the early nineteen-nineties, the writer Neil Gaiman began to work on “Coraline,” a book aimed at “middle readers”—aged nine to twelve—in which he reimagined Clifford’s demon as “the other mother,” an evil and cunning anti-creator who threatens to destroy his young protagonist. “The idea was, look, if the Victorians can do something that deeply unsettles kids, I should be able to do that, too,” he told me recently.

Gaiman, who is forty-nine and English, with a pale face and a wild, corkscrewed mop of black-and-gray hair, is unusually prolific. In addition to horror, he writes fantasy, fairy tales, science fiction, and apocalyptic romps, in the form of novels, comics, picture books, short stories, poems, and screenplays. Now and then, he writes a song. Gaiman’s books are genre pieces that refuse to remain true to their genres, and his audience is broader than any purist’s: he defines his readership as “bipeds.” His mode is syncretic, with sources ranging from English folktales to glam rock and the Midrash, and enchantment is his major theme: life as we know it, only prone to visitations by Norse gods, trolls, Arthurian knights, and kindergarten-age zombies. “Neil’s writing is kind of fey in the best sense of the word,” the comic-book writer Alan Moore told me. “His best effects come out of people or characters or situations in the real world being starkly juxtaposed with this misty fantasy world.”
The model for Gaiman’s eclecticism is G. K. Chesterton; his work, Gaiman says, “left me with an idea of London as this wonderful, mythical, magical place, which became the way I saw the world.” Chesterton’s career also serves as a warning. “He would have been a better writer if he’d written less,” Gaiman says. “There’s always that fear of writing too much if you’re a reasonably facile writer, and I’m a reasonably facile writer.”

Gaiman’s two most recent novels, “Anansi Boys” (2005) and “The Graveyard Book” (2008)—a retelling of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” set in a graveyard—débuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list in their respective categories, adult and children’s literature. Yet Gaiman remains somewhat marginal. The Times of London recently referred to him as “the most famous writer you’ve never heard of.” The New York Times waited to review “The Graveyard Book” for several months after its publication, by which time it had won the 2009 Newbery Medal, one of the highest honors in children’s fiction, and been on the best-seller list for eighteen weeks. “I have at this point a critic-proof career,” Gaiman said. “The fans already knew about the book.”

The title character of “Coraline” is an inquisitive girl with distracted parents, living in an old house with a bricked-up door in one of its rooms. One day, she tests the door and finds that it opens onto a passageway. As with Alice’s rabbit hole and Lucy Pevensie’s closet full of furs, at the other end is an alternate world: in this case, a house that is an idealized replica of Coraline’s own, presided over by the other mother, who, Gaiman writes, resembles her real one— “Only her skin was as white as paper. Only she was taller and thinner. Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving, and her dark red fingernails were curved and sharp.” In place of eyes, she has two black buttons. She entreats Coraline to stay, plying her with delicious food (her own mother cooks from packets) and magical toys. But the other mother’s world is an illusion and a trap; what she really wants is to take Coraline’s eyes and replace them with buttons.

Read the rest of Goodyear's detailed, excellent piece in The New Yorker online.

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