Only in hindsight do you realize how horrifying most children’s books are. Some of the English language’s strongest stories of murder, betrayal, abandonment and cruelty are hidden inside those cheery covers, but children themselves, those little brutes, never turn a hair. So maybe the reverse is true as well. Maybe a book like Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, which seems so bland to my jaded adult eyes, will send them into absolute ecstasies of terror. It seems doubtful, though.

Coraline claims to be that rare beast, the book for all ages, and there’s no good reason why it shouldn’t be. The Sandman comics that made Gaiman famous are full of the loopy surrealism kids’ books thrive on. Gaiman knows how to put a plot together, and in Coraline he pulls out all the standard kid’s lit tropes and puts them through their paces. Little Coraline Jones—quiet, clever, and so self-possessed she seems sedated—finds a doorway into an apartment just like her own, or nearly. The other apartment is a pretty sweet setup: the toys play on their own, only her favourite foods are ever served, and her doppel-parents give her all the attention her real parents never seem to be able to. But problems crop up fast, and if Coraline wants to get back home again she has to rescue her real parents and three other lost children from her button-eyed, beetle-eating “other mother.”

It should be a winner, and it does have its moments. In Coraline’s real world, the old ladies next door spend all their time reminiscing about their days on stage. In the other world they’re playing a never-ending engagement, a mix of vaudeville schtick and snippets of Shakespeare, to an appreciative audience of chocolate-eating dogs. This kind of seemingly innocuous creepiness could make the book if Gaiman let it stand on its own, but he doesn’t. Passages like Coraline’s explanation of what it means to be brave are the worst sort of narrative clumsiness—parents might nod approvingly, but the book is ostensibly for kids, and any preschooler faces up to more pants-shitting fear in one day than an adult can dream of in a year. They already know the score. Dave McKean’s spikily grotesque illustrations are more up to speed, but there aren’t nearly enough of them.

Gaiman diehards will likely get a bang out of this, but the rest of you shouldn’t throw away your dog-eared Narnia books just yet.