March 21, 2008 at 10:19 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
40. The Doom of the Haunted Opera by John Bellairs; completed by Brad Strickland (Children’s Gothic) 153 p.
After the death of John Bellairs in 1991, another author, Brad Strickland, completed two unfinished novels and wrote two more books from one-page summaries, of which this is one of the latter. (He also went on to write his own novels continuing the series.)
While Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmerman are away at an old friend’s funeral in Florida, Lewis and Rose Rita find an old opera score while poking around the old New Zebedee Opera House. Written by the late Immanuel Vanderhelm, the music immediately becomes a hit with New Zebedee adults. When the composer’s grandson, Henry Vanderhelm, arrives in town and offers to mount the opera at his own expense, the town jumps at the chance—not realizing that performing the opera will raise the dead and enslave them to Vanderhelm, allowing him to take over the world.
Under Vanderhelm’s spell, the town’s inhabitants don’t seem to notice when New Zebedee is cut off from the outside world by a magical fog. Radio and television signals don’t penetrate, and no one can enter or leave the town. Without magical assistance, Lewis and Rose Rita are at a loss as to how to stop Vaderhelm’s evil plan, but that doesn’t stop them from trying everything they can think of.
Brad Strickland did a good job of writing in Bellairs’s style; even knowing that he wrote it, I couldn’t really tell the book apart from any of the Bellairs books I’ve read lately—except, perhaps, for the pacing. Ordinarily, Bellairs allows events to unfold over a period of months, perfectly content to fast-forward through weeks or months in which nothing much happens. In contrast, The Doom of the Haunted Opera takes place over a period of days. It’s not all that important of a distinction; although the pacing is one of the things I particularly notice about Bellairs’s novels, I don’t find that it adds anything to the story. I’m curious to know if this book is an exception, or if Brad Strickland always uses this more traditional time scale.
Pages read: 10,864
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Brad Strickland, John Bellairs, Lewis Barnavelt
March 19, 2008 at 10:11 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
37. The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs (Children’s Gothic) 188 p.
When I was young, I always got this book confused with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I finally got around to reading a year or two ago. As it turns out, they have roughly nothing in common.
At the end of The House with a Clock in Its Walls, 10-year-old Lewis Barnavelt mentions that he’s made a new friend, a tomboy called Rose Rita Pottinger. I haven’t been able to get my hands on the second book in the trilogy, The Figure in the Shadows, but by the beginning of The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring, Lewis and Rose Rita are best friends. Lewis, now 12, is spending the summer at boy scout camp, and 13-year-old Rose Rita is feeling depressed and a little angry at her friend for leaving her in the lurch. Luckily, one of her favourite people, Mrs. Florence Zimmerman, has a plan to cheer her up.
Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmerman set off on a car trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, stopping on the way to settle some of Mrs. Zimmerman’s family affairs. It seems a rather peculiar cousin of hers has died, leaving her his farm, as well as a ring he believes may be magic. When the two arrive at the farmhouse, they find the place has been ransacked, the locked desk drawer containing the ring has been forced open, and the ring is gone. It’s a sinister start to their vacation, but they resolve to have fun anyway and try to forget the incident.
Soon, worse things happen; things that aren’t so easy to brush aside. Mrs. Zimmerman finds evidence that suggests she had a deadly enemy—a suspicion confirmed by a sudden, unexplained attack of pain. She recovers, but it isn’t long before worse happens: Mrs. Zimmerman disappears! Left alone in a place she doesn’t know, Rose Rita has to find out what happened to her friend, and save her.
I like Rose Rita, and some of her problems were a nice change of pace from the ones usually faced by Bellairs heroes.
I should have been a boy, Rose Rita thought. Homely boys didn’t have as many problems as homely girls did. Also, boys could go to boy scout camp, and girls couldn’t. Boys could get together for a game of flies and grounders and nobody thought there was anything strange about it. Boys didn’t have to wear nylons and pleated skirts and starched blouses to church on Sunday. As far as Rose Rita was concerned, boys really had the life. But she had been born a girl, and there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it.
Mrs. Zimmerman is a fun character. I liked her in the first book, and I liked her here, too. She reminds me a little of one of my aunts, in that she’s in her sixties and her favourite colour is purple, and she wears a lot of purple clothes and has a lot of purple things in her house. Unlike Mrs. Zimmerman, my aunt does not do magic or smoke cigars. At least, not in front of me.
Pages read: 10,373
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, John Bellairs, Lewis Barnavelt
March 18, 2008 at 11:18 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
34. The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs (Children’s Horror) 179 p.
This is John Bellairs’s most well-known book, and for some reason, it’s the one I remembered best. (Probably because a minor plot point, the Hand of Glory—a candle growing out of the back of a severed hand—made a deep impression on me when I first read it.)
The House with a Clock in Its Walls is actually surprisingly creepy. It’s the first of three books featuring Lewis Barnavelt, a shy 10-year-old whose parents have recently died in a car accident. When the book opens, Lewis is on a bus, on his way to New Zebedee, Michigan, where he will live with his Uncle Jonathan, who he’s never met:
Of course, Lewis had heard a few things about Uncle Jonathan, like that he smoked and drank and played poker. These were not such bad things in a Catholic family, but Lewis had two maiden aunts who were Baptists, and they had warned him about Jonathan. He hoped that the warnings would turn out to be unnecessary.
And at first, they do seem to be unnecessary. Jonathan is a very friendly man, but he soon turns out to have some strange habits. Lewis finds out that his uncle is a warlock, and their next-door neighbour and Jonathan’s best friend, Florence Zimmerman, is a witch. This turns out to be rather a good thing—the real problem is the ominous ticking which seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
I should mention that I’m quite pleased by this edition (pictured above), because even though it doesn’t have the Gorey cover, it does have his original illustrations inside. Like the one below:
Without being particularly preachy, this book gives a great object lesson on why you should never try to bribe or impress someone to keep their friendship. Especially by using witchcraft and necromancy.
If you want to try out a John Bellairs book, or know a child who might, The House with a Clock in Its Walls is a great place to start. It’s an excellent, scary story, it’s the first in a series, and it’s actually the first children’s book Bellairs wrote.
Pages read: 9,837
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, John Bellairs, Lewis Barnavelt
