In his fourth ghostly thriller, John Bellairs heeds the maxim: "Shoemaker, stick to your last." Though this latest novel introduces a new hero, the 12-year-old Johnny Dixon, and is unrelated to the previous trilogy, the author employs the same disarming devices to win our acceptance of some crucial otherworldly trappings. These include the restless and malign spirit of a long-dead, mad clergyman, Father Remigius Baart; a cursed Egyptian tomb figurine and a magic ring capable of destroying its wearer's enemies. The year is 1951, the setting a backwater Massachusetts town called Duston Heights. Mr. Bellairs meticulously catalogues the specifics of this time and place: afternoon snacks of "Ritz crackers spread with pink pimento-flavored cream cheese"' an Atwater Kent table-model radio; a black Sessions clock on the sideboard. And so we instinctively grant him credence when he introduces a sepulchral villain and attendant supernatural paraphernalia. Cannily, the author defuses audience skepticism by providing two adult scoffers within The Curse of the Blue Figurine: Professor Roderick Childermass, the young hero's neighbor/confidant; and a know-it-all psychiatrist with the inspired name of Highgaz Melkonian. After they convince both hero and readers that the tale's bizarre happenings are all products of our overworked imaginations, Mr. Bellairs catches us completely off guard with a hair-raising, grand-whammy climax: a fight to the death between evil spirit and flesh-and-blood boy atop a New Hampshire mountain peak. Susceptible young readers should relish this Gothic spine-tingler.
Selma G. Lanes
The New York Times Book Review
September 25, 1983, p. 29.
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