ABSTRACT
Neil Gaiman's Coraline is a young adult horror story about a prepubescent girl, an alternative dimension and sinister creatures. Through the vantage of Neil Gaiman's gothic young adult novel Coraline, it examines questions of how authority is internalised, how fantasies of the commands of the sovereign become the glue of social discourse. By critically evaluating this intervention of kinship, the chapter explores how the story of Coraline develops an alternative to the normative coding of childhood imaginings as fantastical escapism. Instead of the namesake protagonist Coraline escaping her everyday reality, Gaiman develops a narrative in which Coraline remythologises her world and, specifically, her parents, her figures of lex, sex and rex. This fantasmatic remodelling of Coraline's kinship is marked by a persistent unnamable distortion that eventually becomes embodied by the 'old maternal god' of the story, a spidery maleficent Thing.
