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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Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass. The Dispossessed they be for ever.

from Chapter 9 The Flight of the Noldor

I took The Silmarillion to camp with me the summer of 1978. I’d gotten it for Christmas the previous year, but I was put off by its Biblical diction. Still, I was determined to make my way through it. I mean, Tolkien was my favorite author, and I’d already read The Hobbit twice and Lord of the Rings, including the appendices.

I did read it that summer in the woods of Upper Delaware Valley. For all the activities, there was always free time to read, and read I did. Beside Tolkien’s book, I read Cajus Bekker’s A War Diary of the German Luftwaffe. Bekker’s book was a relatively easy undertaking, Tolkien’s was not.

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Ten years ago to the month (I started this in October), I wrote about Terry Brooks’ groundbreaking The Sword of Shannara (1977), and declared that the joy I got reading the book the first time around was something I couldn’t recapture. Time had opened a gap between the book and what I could take away that seemed uncrossable. Revisiting the book, yet again, I no longer think that’s completely true, but it’s not entirely false.

When I set out earlier this year on my journey through Tolkien’s writing, I decided to mix it up with several works clearly inspired by Tolkien, and particularly the Lord of the Rings. Bored of the Rings (reviewed here), was my first choice because it’s an explicit parody of the trilogy (and a brilliant one!).

Sword was an easy choice, as well, even if its origin story is complex and was touched by divers hands (well, six, to be precise, between Brooks and the Del Reys). I’m not sure Brooks set out to write a story that tracks so closely to the LotR in so many places, but that was result. It kicked off the mass-market success of quest trilogies featuring secret heirs in search of the foozle needed to bring down the Dark Lord in his isolated redoubt.

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This book is predominantly concerned with making money, and from its pages a reader may learn much about the character and the literary integrity of the authors. Of boggies, however, he will discover next to nothing, since anyone in the possession of a mere moiety of his marbles will readily concede that such creatures could exist only in the minds of children of the sort whose childhoods are spent in wicker baskets and who grow up to be muggers, dog thieves, and insurance salesmen. Nonetheless, judging from the sales of Prof. Tolkien’s interesting books, this is a rather sizable group, sporting the kind of scorch marks on their pockets that only the spontaneous combustion of heavy wads of crumpled money can produce. For such readers we have collected here a few bits of racial slander concerning boggies, culled by placing Prof. Tolkien’s books on the floor in a neat pile and going over them countless times in a series of skips and short hops. For them we also include a brief description of the soon-to-be-published-if-this-incredible-dog-sells account of Dildo Bugger’s earlier adventures, called by him Travels with Goddam in Search of Lower Middle Earth, but wisely renamed by the publisher Valley of the Trolls.

from the Prologue — Concerning Boggies from Bored of the Rings

My introduction to Bored of the Rings (1969, a scatalogical, offensive, and dated, but hilarious, parody of The Lord of the Rings), came at the hands of a friend of mine, Karl H., during a Boy Scout camping trip in the late seventies. My first memory of Karl is him at 8 years old being carried kicking and yelling over the school custodian’s shoulder after he’d been caught trying to scale the back fence. Two years older than me, we stayed friends until he graduated high school in 1982. I saw him once more after that before he disappeared into the wilds of the West Coast. When first his sister, and then his mother passed away, I didn’t find out until weeks after the fact and missed both funerals and him.

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In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party – The Hobbit

Fifty years ago, when I first read this book, I didn’t imagine I’d still be reading it so many years later. Heck, I doubt I could have even imagined being as old as I am now. But I do reread it every few years. When I revisit The Hobbit, my journey is bathed in nostalgia as much as with the simple enjoyment caused by reading a charming book that I happen to know inside out, from the opening line above on through to the very end.

In my initial article on half a century of reading Tolkien back in January, I described my dad trying to get our first color tv in time to watch the Rankin & Bass The Hobbit. Remembering that again last week left me thinking more of my dad, now gone nearly 24 years, than the book. He was ten years younger than I am now when the movie first aired, which makes me feel incredibly old at the moment. For such a conservative man,  he was excited to see it — admittedly, in a restrained way. I think we liked it well enough, but leaving out Beorn irked us both. Beyond Tolkien’s books, our fantasy tastes rarely coincided (I’ve got a shelf full of David Eddings books he bought, if anyone’s interested), but with The Hobbit and LOTR, we were in complete agreement.

What’s there to say about The Hobbit here on Black Gate? Nothing, really. I imagine most visitors here have read it, many more than once, and have their own ideas on it. It’s one of the most widely read books in the world. Instead, I’m going to discuss some adaptations of the book. But first, a summary.

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A wild light came into Frodo’s eyes. ‘Stand away! Don’t touch me!’ he cried. ‘It is mine, I say. Be off!’ His hand strayed to his sword-hilt. But then quickly his voice changed. ‘No, no, Sam,’ he said sadly. ‘But you must understand. It is my burden, and no one else can bear it. It is too late now, Sam dear. You can’t help me in that way again. I am almost in its power now. I could not give it up, and if you tried to take it I should go mad.’

Frodo to Sam in Mount Doom from The Return of the King

And so we come to the end of the first part of my return to JRR Tolkien’s work. For those not following along with my earlier essays (links at the bottom), inspired by a hate watch of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, I picked up The Fellowship of the Ring and quickly succumbed to a complete reread of the trilogy. As I set out to write an article about Fellowship, I instead, found myself realizing I’ve been reading the professor’s books for fifty years and how much they’d meant to me.

Last time, I wrote that when I was young, I tended to struggle through bits of The Two Towers. That was never the case with The Return of the King, something that I found to remain so on this reading. It’s got wilder and bigger battles than the previous book, incredible scenes (including one of the greatest in all three books and that Jackson insanely cut omitted from the theatrical release!), and Frodo’s and Sam’s journey becomes more desperate and its evocation of Christ-like self-sacrifice more potent. The penultimate chapter, The Scouring of the Shire, portrays the transformation wrought on the four hobbits by their undertakings. Finally, the book ends with one of my favorite closing lines of any book.

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