Introduction
We moved into our flat in Littlemead, in the tiny Sussex town of Nutley, in the south of England, in 1987. Once upon a time it had been a manor house, built for the physician to the King of England himself, so I was told by the old man who had once owned the house (before he sold it to a pair of local builders). It had been a very grand house then, but it was now converted into flats.
Flat number 4, where we lived, was a good place, if a little odd. Above us, a Greek family. Beneath us, a little old lady, half blind, who would telephone me whenever my little children moved, and tell me that she was not certain what was happening upstairs, but she thought that there were elephants. I was never entirely sure how many flats there were in the house, nor how many of them were occupied.
We had a hallway running the length of the flat, as big as any room. At the end of the hall hung a wardrobe door, as a mirror.
When I started to write a book for Holly, my five-year-old daughter, I set it in the house. It seemed easy. That way I wouldn’t have to explain to her where anything was. I changed a couple of things, of course, swapped the position of Holly’s bedroom and the lounge.
Then I took a closed oak-panelled door that opened on to a brick wall, and a sense of place, from the drawing room in the house I grew up in.
That house was big and old, and it had been split in two just before we moved there. We had the servants’ quarters and the oak-panelled drawing room (‘Only for best’) with a door at the end that had once been the family’s entrance, but that now led nowhere. It opened on to a brick wall.
I took that room and that door, along with the front room of my grandmother’s house (‘Only for best, not for the family’, still-life oil paintings of fruit on the walls) and I put them into the book I had started writing.
The book was called Coraline. I had typed the name Caroline, and it came out wrong. I looked at the word ‘Coraline’ and knew it was someone’s name. I wanted to know what happened to her.
Holly liked scary stories, with witches and brave little girls in them. Those were the kinds of stories she told me. So Holly’s story was going to be scary.
I wrote an opening that I later deleted. It went:
This is the story of Coraline, who was small for her age, and found herself in darkest danger. Before it was all over Coraline had seen what lay behind mirrors, and had a close call with a bad hand, and had come face to face with her other mother; she had rescued her true parents from a fate worse than death and triumphed against overwhelming odds.
This is the story of Coraline, who lost her parents, and found them again, and (more or less) escaped (more or less) unscathed.
I stopped writing Holly’s book when we moved to America. (I had been writing it in my own time. It didn’t seem like I had any ‘own time’ any longer.)
Six years later I picked it up and continued from the middle of the sentence I’d stopped at in August 1992.
It was:
‘Hello,’ said Coraline. ‘How did you get in?’ The cat didn’t say anything. Coraline got out of bed
I started it again because I realised that if I didn’t, my youngest daughter, Maddy, would be too old for it by the time I was done. I started it for Holly. I finished it for Maddy.
We were living in a gothic old house in the middle of America, with a turret and a wrap-around porch with steps up to it. It’s a house built over a hundred years ago by a German immigrant – a cartographer (that’s someone who makes maps) and artist. His son, Henry, was said to have been the first man to put an engine on a boat, or on a bicycle, and was described as ‘the greatest creative figure in the history of the racing car’.
Now I was writing Coraline again, I still had no time, so I would write fifty words a night in bed, before I fell asleep. I went on a cruise to raise money for the First Amendment (that’s the one about Freedom of Speech) in comics, and wrote more of the story sitting out on the deck. I finished it in a little cabin on a lake in the woods.
Dave McKean, artist and friend, took photographs of Littlemead, which he then played with to make the house on the back cover of the original American edition.
When Henry Selick made his stop-motion animated film of Coraline, he invited me to the studio. There were a lot of sets there, each behind a black curtain. Henry proudly showed me the house that Coraline lived in 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.’