anjum: now tumbling

One of the best children’s stories of recent years was Neil Gaiman’s Coraline in which the heroine finds a door that leads to a world where she has a different family, and an Other Mother with button eyes who wants her to stay forever. It’s not just the Other Mother (or the Alice’s Red Queen, or Narnia’s White Witch, or Oz’s Wicked Witch) that’s scary. It’s the place she belongs to, in the mirror, through the wardrobe or over the rainbow. They tap into a primal mixture of fear and excitement at the prospect of vanishing into another world and, perhaps, never coming home.