Black Gate

I write scary thrillers for kids because I have the imagination of a ten-year old. The center of my books is always the childhood of which I seem to have a nearly total recall.

John Bellairs

It’s perhaps fitting I follow up a years worth of writing about JRR Tolkien with something about John Bellairs‘ young adult stories. In response to reading Tolkien’s books, he wrote The Face in the Frost (1969). It’s a comic tale of two wizards, Prospero (not the one you’re thinking of) and Francis Bacon fighting to save the world from the machinations of the evil Melchius. When he wrote his next book, The House With a Clock in Its Walls (1973) as an adult supernatural thriller, he was encouraged to rewrite it for children. His publisher didn’t see enough of a market for the sort of adult fiction he had created.

Over the remaining eighteen years of his life, Bellairs created three similar series of stories and completed fourteen additional novels. House was the first of three tales about Lewis Barnavelt, an orphan who comes to live with his uncle in the small Michigan town of New Zebedee. The town is modelled on Bellair’s own hometown, Marshall, Michigan. The second series is four books featuring Anthony Monday and his friend, the elderly librarian Myra Eells. The first book, The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn is a straightforward mystery, but the later books introduce supernatural elements. I suspect both Bellairs and his publisher understood what his audience wanted. Finally, there is the eight book long Johnny Dixon and the Professor series, starting with The Curse of the Blue Figurine. Set in 1951, Johnny has been, following the death of his mother and his father being sent to Korea as a fighter pilot, to live with his grandparents in Massachusetts. As you can see, each series features a young boy, displaced from his home or isolated and befriended by a older adult who is willing to help him face whatever adventures come his way. Despite a similar framework, there’s a very different feel to each of the books.

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Jack of Shadows (Signet, August 1972). Cover by Bob Pepper

A decade ago this summer, Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny was reissued in print, after many years languishing in obscurity even among the author’s most devoted fans. The novel is vintage Zelazny. For many who just read those words, that will be enough. They can stop reading now and go and buy a copy and enjoy — even if, like me, they read it before, quite a while ago, in an earlier release from a different publisher. You guys, go have fun. We’ll chat later. The rest of you, continue on with me to the next paragraph, if you would.

If you’re still with me here, then two things must be true: One, you are intrigued enough to want to know more — and I applaud you for it! — but two, simply saying “a classic Zelazny book is back in print” is not enough to send you racing to the bookstore. You demand more. Very well.

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