Coraline is a cornerstone of children's horror for a reason. It's really fucking good. The best children's stories respect their audience rather than pander to them and you can tell that Gaiman put in the work to craft a story that took children and their fears seriously.

The heart of this story is its titular protagonist Coraline Jones. She's incredibly clever and perceptive but never jarringly mature. I equally detest precocious child characters boringly rendered as hyper-competent pseudo-adults and patronizingly written child characters who exist more as symbols to impart messages to their audience rather than as rounded humans. Gaiman easily sidestepped both of these pitfalls by drawing out the specificity of Coraline. She's allowed to be clever but Gaiman never allows her perceptiveness to override her genuine fear throughout the story.

One of Neil Gaiman's skills as a writer is in teasing out the specific fears associated with childhood. While this book is filled with haunting and creepy imagery the moments that stuck out to me the most were of Coraline alone. That instinctual child fear of not having your parents to protect you was pointed and chilling.

I will say I am sad that my general exhaustion from my course load did impact my ability to immerse myself in the story. While I definitely intellectually appreciated Neil Gaiman's writing my general exhaustion with children's lit at the time of reading did impact my ability to immerse myself in the story.