Memories Dreams Reflections 18: John Bellairs

“I write scary thrillers for kids because I have the imagination of a ten-year-old. I love haunted houses, ghosts, witches, mummies, incantations, secret rituals performed by the light of the waning moon, coffins, bones, cemeteries, and enchanted objects.”

-John Bellairs, Locus 1991

In an earlier entry in this series (#7) I mentioned some of the books I enjoyed reading as a child, and one of the names I briefly mentioned was John Bellairs. I'd like to go into a bit more detail about that in this entry because he pretty much was the first author I really gravitated to. 

When I was young, I was a huge fan of the gothic novelist John Bellairs (b. January 17, 1938– d. March 8, 1991), who pretty much wrote books mainly for kids and teenagers, though he did a few adult novels as well (these adult novels of which I have not read). Not only were they my entryway to the world of Gothic/horror fiction, but also to the art of Edward Gorey, as his illustrations would usually grace the front cover, back cover, and frontispiece of the books of John Bellairs. I was especially obsessed with Bellairs' series of supernatural mystery/thriller novels featuring Johnny Dixon. Those books take place in New England in the 1950’s, and revolve around Johnny Dixon, a lonely and quiet bespectacled boy who, though he likes nothing more in life than to read his books in peace and quiet, always finds himself being drawn into inexplicable adventures, often revolving around cursed objects, undead wizards, killer robots, time travel, and so forth. Usually accompanying him on these adventures were his best friend and classmate Fergie, his neighbor Prof. Childermass (an elderly man who is Johnny’s second best friend), and Father Higgins, the town priest. The titles of these books were quite evocative: there was The Curse of the Blue Figurine (1983), The Mummy, The Will and the Crypt (1983), The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull (1984), The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost (1985), The Eyes of the Killer Robot (1986), The Trolley to Yesterday (1989), The Chessmen of Doom (1989), and The Secret of the Underground Room (1990). Following Bellairs’ death in 1991, further Johnny Dixon mysteries were written by Brad Strickland, but I never read those. I think I responded to Bellairs' Dixon books more so than any of his other series was because in some ways I identified with the main character: a shy, bookish kid living in a small New England town, with a Catholic upbringing, but who was also obsessed with the occult and anything creepy (now that I think back, I believe that Johnny was also very interested in the Ancient Egyptians), and who preferred the company of adults rather than kids his own age. I never wore glasses, though. 

The first Dixon mystery I read was the third one in the series, The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull: I got it through my school’s Scholastic book club sometime around the 4th or 5th grade. I loved it so much that I began collecting the other ones in the series.

Having said that, I also found the books of John Bellairs to be very scary at times. Take The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. In this novel, Johnny Dixon and Prof. Childermass visit an old inn in a little New Hampshire town. The owner of this inn just happens to have in his possession a clock that had been built years ago by Prof. Childermass’ father, a clock that is said to be haunted. In the bottom half of the clock there’s a small dollhouse room, decorated like the parlor of a Victorian house from the 1870’s. Inside this parlor are various objects, including a tiny skull and a doll of a man that’s supposed to represent Prof. Childermass’ granduncle, who was murdered by a sorcerer many years ago. That night, Johnny sleepwalks down to the inn’s basement, where he has a vision in which he sees the doll come to life, only to get smothered to death by a tall, gaunt shadow. That scene is creepy enough, but things get worse. When the Professor touches the skull, he unwittingly is cursed, and later on vanishes. When Johnny visits the house of his friend, he encounters this creepy scene (the fact that it involved a face in a mirror made it doubly nightmarish in my mind):

“Halfway to the window Johnny froze. He had seen something out of the corner of his eye, a sudden image in the small rectangular mirror that hung over the bureau. He turned and looked. In the mirror he saw the professor’s face, looking haggard and disheveled. His eyes pleaded and, as Johnny watched, his lips formed silent words. ‘Help me.’”

Another of the spookier Dixon mysteries is The Eyes of the Killer Robot. The plot for this one is pretty silly: it’s been years since I’ve read it, but I think the story revolved around this: the town that Johnny Dixon lived in was holding some kind of baseball contest where if you could strike out a major league batter, you’d win $10,000, and some evil inventor planned to win the contest by building a robot that resembled a man in a baseball uniform and using “an ancient magical formula” to bring it to life. The crux of the story was that the robot could only be brought to life when a pair of dead man’s eyes are placed within the robot’s head. The inventor had a grudge against Johnny’s grandfather, so to get back at him he plans on using Johnny’s eyes to bring the robot to life. As I said, pretty silly stuff. Still, there are some unsettling moments, such as this one, where Johnny spots a ghost lurking outside his bedroom window:

“But just as he was turning to pull down the bedspread, he froze. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen something.

There was a figure crouching on the porch roof outside his bedroom window.

An icy breath of fear blew across Johnny’s body. In a flash he knew that the creature was someone who shouldn’t be there, someone who couldn’t be there- it was a visitor from another world. Slowly, Johnny turned to face the thing. The flashlight’s beam cast a ghostly sheen on the window, and beyond the glass Johnny saw a fearfully thin shape shuffling forward on his knees. As Johnny watched, rigid with terror, the shadowy form groped at the window… and then Johnny blacked out, and he fell in a heap on the floor.”

By this point, one would think that Johnny should just stop looking at things he notices at the corner of his eye."

Here’s another of the spookier scenes:

“Not far from the back door of the house stood a bench covered with peeling white paint. It was a garden seat, the kind people used to make so they could sit outdoors on hot summer nights. The bench stood in a patch of wild rosebushes not far from the rugged wall of the mountain, which towered overhead. A man was sitting on the bench- a man Johnny had never seen before. He wore baggy, dusty overalls and a faded plaid shirt, and he had a big mop of straw-colored hair. The man sat hunched over with his face in his hands, and he seemed to be crying. Johnny stood dead still. The bunch of pieweed stalks fell from his numb fingers, and he took a couple of shuffling steps forward. And then, as Johnny watched, the man stood up. He took his hands away from his face and he stumbled. Johnny gasped in terror- the man had no eyes. Streaks of blood ran down from empty black sockets.

‘They took my eyes,’ the man moaned. ‘They took my eyes.’

Johnny opened and closed his mouth, and made little whimpering noises. He shut his eyes tight to block out this horrible vision, and when he opened them again a second later, the man was gone.”

Granted, that’s the kind of scene that, when I read it over now, makes me giggle, but when I was a kid, I thought that was pretty scary stuff.

More info on John Bellairs and his work can be found here:

http://www.bellairsia.com/