Review: Curse "Handles The Snug Suspense Expertly"

Book review: The Curse of the Blue FigurineAnother of Bellairs' nicely shivery magic tales, featuring, again, a boy of the Fifties displaced from his home. With his mother dead and his pilot father off to the Korean War, Johnny Dixon is living with his grandparents and spending time with their broadly characterized eccentric neighbor Professor Childermass. The professor tells Johnny a chilling tale about the apparent vengeful magic and mysterious disappearance of Father Remigius Baart, who was rector of the local church back in the 1880s. And so, inevitably, while dodging the class bully, Johnny finds himself in the basement of that very church-and finds there a hollowed-out missal containing a statue shaped like an Egyptian mummy case and a note, signed RB, threatening peril to the soul of "whoever removes these things from the church." But Johnny panics and dashes from the church, clutching the book with its statue…and thus begins the unsettling series of events that leave him pale and plagued with nightmares. On a later visit to the empty church a mysterious Mr. Beard gives Johnny a ring of power and summons him to a midnight meeting in a park. The worried professor trails Johnny to the park, observes him talking to no one (as it seems to him), and recommends a psychiatrist and a weekend outing. Johnny seems to improve…until he and the professor, on their outing, confront the spirit of evil sorcerer Baart/Beard in an all-night, mountaintop battle between light and dark. Bellairs handles the snug suspense expertly, never confounding readers' expectations, but fulfilling them with communicable relish.

Kirkus Reviews
Vol. LI, No. 10, May 15, 1983, pp. 578-79.