Review: Face "Whimsical Humor Mixes Well with This Tightly Plotted Adventure"

Book review: The Face in the Frost This is a long-time favorite of mine, a fantasy that expertly blends light-hearted humor with a sense of dark menace. Our heroes are a pair of elderly wizards named Prospero (not the one you are thinking of!) and Roger Bacon. The setting is a barely disguised medieval Europe, and the text is replete with anachronisms.

Prospero lives in one of the Southern Kingdoms (which are an eclectic collection of tiny city-states closely resembling medieval Italy), ruled by an eccentric wizard named King Gorm. Prospero's house is a truly baroque and tasteless affair constructed with almost Victorian over-elaboration. The inside of the house is littered with curios and oddments, much of it magical, including a temperamental magical mirror.

Soon after this, Roger Bacon comes to visit, with dark tidings of menacing apparitions spreading across the Northern Kingdoms. The two wizards decide to investigate together, and so goes the story.

John Bellairs is mostly a writer of children's stories and, so far as I can ascertain, The Face in the Frost was his single foray into fiction meant for a more mature (well, barely) audience. That is a pity, because his whimsical humor mixes well with his tightly plotted adventures. Since it has been 30 years since this book was published, it's probably a forlorn hope that he'll ever produce another. I count myself lucky to have found this one.

Tim

stmoroky.com