The Face in the Frost, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, and The Curse of the Blue Figurine, John Bellairs
Iāve been reading as much as usual (a lot), but Iāve also been preoccupied with a novel Iām writing, so Iāve slacked off in the reviews department. This will partly make up for it.
John Bellairs (1938-1991) was born in the town of Marshall, Michigan, a place of great architectural variety and evocative, faintly sinister settings. He grew up to be a teacher and, in a small way, a writer of quirky books: St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies and The Pedant and the Shuffly, the first being in part a hagiography of the patron saint of fidgeting Catholic kids who cannot be still in church, and the second a James Thurberish fantasy with lots of wordplay. Neither made much of a splash, though both are readable.
Then, after he read Tolkienās The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Bellairs decided that while he enjoyed the tales, neither work was playful enough nor lightened by puckish humor. The result was his adult fantasy The Face in the Frost, a tour de force that alternates between funny parts and genuinely scary ones. The heroes are the English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon and the wizard of unspecified homeland Prospero (but not the one youāre thinking of). It is a quest novel involving an evil-hearted sorcerer (Prosperoās college roommate from magic school) who desires to gain an object of power even if it means his old classmateās death. It rips along at a nice pace and sags0 only a bit in its conclusion, which pulls in a deus ex machina student of the kabbalah.
He planned a follow-up novel switching from a late Medieval setting to a modern American one. His publisher turned it down, but Phyllis Fogelberg, founder of the late lamented Dial Books for Young Readers line, told him she would publish it provided he rewrote it as a novel for tweens and teens. The result was The House with a Clock in Its Walls, the first book featuring young Lewis Barbavelt, his uncle Jonathan, and the next-door neighbor and good witch Mrs. Zimmermann. Brilliantly, Bellairs set this story in a fictional town, New Zebedee, Michigan, based directly on Marshall. Recently orphaned Lewis comes to live with his uncle Jonathan just when evil magic begins to manifest in the small town. Bellairs vividly presents ti0me and place, and itās impossible not to root for young Lewis as he deals with a long-dead sorcerer named Isaac Izard and his evil widow Selena. It seems that Izard, who hated everybody and everything, built not only the house where Jonathan now lives, but a Doomsday Clock, which has just started ticking. Whether the reader is a young one or an oldāun like me, the book is a fun, spooky read, better than the movie in evoking personalities and places. By the way, the real House With(out) a Clock in Its Walls still stands in Marshall.
Having made a success and having launched a series with that book, Bellairs later wrote another YA, The Curse of the Blue Figurine, this one set in the 1950s in a fictional Massachusetts town, Duston Heights (based on the town where Bellairs lived while working as a teacher, Haverhill). This created a new young protagonist, Johnny Dixon. Though not orphaned, Johnny grieves and feels lonely when his mother dies of cancer and the USAF stations his father in Korea as a fighter pilot. His Gramma and Grampa Dixon take him in, and right across the street from them lives the elderly and incredibly cranky academic, Professor Roderick Childermass. Johnny is a bookworm and loner who likes spooky radio shows and horror movies. In the cellar of the local church, he discovers a small blue figurine, an Egyptian ushabti. He takes it, not realizing it is a cursed object, belonging to a corrupt priest, Father Baart. Before long eerie things begin to happen, his folks think heās going crazy, and the irascible Professor Childermass teams up with Johnny to fight the powers of darkness. Again, the characters and place are vividly dramatized.
If youād like a dose of fun mixed with creepiness, any of these three books would answer.
