The Curse of the Blue Figurine, John Bellairs (365 Books, Day 182)

[rushthatspeaks]

I don't read John Bellairs very often because of the thing that keeps happening with The Face in the Frost. This thing, which I will eventually learn to stop doing to myself, is that I remember that it has been a long time since I read The Face in the Frost, and that it is one of the great fantasy novels-- smart, funny, compassionate, knowledgeable about Renaissance magic-- and I start to reread it in circumstances which involve it being after dark, or being by myself in a strange city, and only then do I remember that it is also one of the two or three books which reliably scare me senseless, every single time. (The other two that I can think of are Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, which will give you permanent scars if you are the sort of person who likes to keep books on the side of your bed, and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which is simply uncopable.)

So the association of Bellairs with extreme grace and erudition but also spending the next two weeks looking twitchily over my shoulder has kept me from reading many of his kids' books, especially since the impression I tend to get from them is that all of the qualities, good and creepy alike, are somewhat toned down.

But I feel like it, every so often. I don't know why. Why do people read horror in the first place? That's a question a lot of critics have spent a lot of time on, and that no one is ever going to be able to answer fully and in a way which satisfies everybody.

One of the reasons I read horror, though, is that it's a genre that gives as much weight to history as I'd like to see it given. In many horror stories, it is perfectly true that the past is neither dead nor past, and there is also the lovely practice that many writers play with of making up cool-sounding academic things. Volumes of forbidden lore half made up and half really there in the library but nothing like so alarming, the infinite cross-references that writers who are in on the joke can make to each other... this sort of textual play is not nearly so traditional in other genres. And this particular volume of Bellairs, with its professor named for Roderick Random and its plot that comes damn close to actively paraphrasing M.R. James' 'The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral' but doesn't, quite, in little loving ways-- this book makes me happy.

It might make the rest of you, happy, too; the only thing I find somewhat mentally uncongenial about it is how incredibly, incredibly Catholic it is. John Dixon lives with his grandparents, since his mother's dead and his father's in the Korean War; the professor across the street tells him a ghost story that took place at their parish church, regarding the disappearance of a former priest there, and John finds a thing that priest left behind, with a note saying that whoever takes it out of the church is at risk of their soul. Of course you can guess what happens from there. I enjoyed the well-evoked fifties-working-class Massachusetts small town, and the way that everyone in John's life does care about him, and is trying to help him, and does sensible things, and yet. This is certainly the only book I've read in which a person who is haunted is sent to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist saves his life by mistake, without knowing it, and through doing something which would reasonably affect both the haunted person's mental state and state of being possessed.

Competent, congenial, creepy as hell: John Bellairs all over. Now it will be another few years before I read any more of him.

Comments

[dorothean]

Oh god I love John Bellairs. I read The House with a Clock in Its Walls in elementary school and it terrified me so much that I couldn't read anything else by him for nearly 20 years, after which point my curiosity exploded. That toning-down of the creepy which you refer to in his children's books was very much welcomed by me at that time, when I was able to enjoy what a lovely, lovely writer Bellairs is without being overcome by fear, ha. Unfortunately I think I missed the time in my life when I would have most appreciated The Face in the Frost (a time when I was studying early modern literature, was a practicing Anglo-Catholic, and not yet a feminist)--somehow knowing that I would have loved it even more then made me love it less when I did read it.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

I have a deep and abiding love for John Bellairs, and it's good to see this book getting some affection. The one that terrified me into spasms as a child was The Mummy, the Will and the Crypt, which was so viscerally awful that I didn't dare go back to Bellairs until I was in my teens. Then I was pleased to find he was just the right amount of creepy and horrid for me.

This is the first Johnny Dixon book, where he meets Professor Childermass for the first time, as I recall. It also features the White Mountains and an AU version of the Old Man of the Mountains called "the Hag" which always makes me laugh. (And Bellairs has had the last posthumous laugh, as the real Old Man is gone now. Of course I thought of this book when it went.)

The White Mountains are a favorite haunt (har, har) of mine and I remember identifying very strongly with the Professor as he stumbled out into a storm at night, poorly clothed, to go get Johnny off the mountainside before the bad guy got him first.

[sovay]

Competent, congenial, creepy as hell: John Bellairs all over. Now it will be another few years before I read any more of him.

One of the ways in which wind05 and I bonded was by sharing our traumatized reminiscences of this particular Bellairs, which I deliberately misfiled in the now-defunct local branch library so that it couldn't (or so I thought) get anyone else. I now know it probably scarred someone who was just looking for a gardening manual.

This is certainly the only book I've read in which a person who is haunted is sent to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist saves his life by mistake, without knowing it, and through doing something which would reasonably affect both the haunted person's mental state and state of being possessed.

I'll have to re-read; I think I missed that in elementary school.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Interesting points about why people read horror. I don't often, but when I do it's the academic stuff that appeals to me. There's something seductive about the idea that our books and articles have cosmic importance, even cosmically evil importance.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

A Face in the Frost so scared me that I have never reread it. But I did make all three of my children read it. And they've read the other Bellairs books, which I've not read.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Yes, and it's excellent, so I know I should reread.

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

I just want to say that, despite my current complete disaffection for horror, I read literally every John Bellairs book in existence when I was in elementary school.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. I need, need, need to read this book again.

Oddly enough (and possibly because I only read Bellairs after I was an adult, like, in my 30's adult), I never thought of him as horror. Dark fantasy, yes. But he doesn't have the hopelessness I associate with (and loathe in) the "life sucks and then you die horribly whether you deserve it or not" attitude I sense in most horror. I remember Bellairs as being ultimately redemptive--which may have to do with his Catholicism.

Really, I should keep my mouth shut until I've re-read. It's been years.

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

I was OBSESSED with his books as a kid, esp. his later ones. Loved the historical aspect and that the kids in his books had true, complex friendships with the adults in their lives who were not their family. I remember scouring the shelves for his stuff every library visit. <3 <3 <3