Review: Face "Cheerful Tone And Unapologetically Anachronistic"

Book review: The Face in the FrostThe Face in the Frost is a book that's been on the to-read list for ten years or so, a much-loved work among various communities of sf nerds. Every time I went to the crappy local used book stores, it was (alphabetically certainly) near the beginning of the typically futile search. The series of strictly young adult books with which Bellairs followed this one pollute the Barnes and Noble shelves of course, but Face is a little deeper in tone, on the cusp of young vs. merely adult, and I never found it in the major chains next to the others.

There are horrors in this novel, but they are of the more suspenseful and cerebral sort, scary because the well-adjusted (and well-described) characters find them so. There are ghosts, there are trolls, there are phantom villages. Bellairs does a good job of finding the spaces in the mundane into which spectral terrors can fit, which makes them, in spots, actually unnerving. As a balance for this, Prospero and Bacon are such likable, sincere, and genial sorts, never far from a pipe or a pint, ready to expound with humor and pointless erudition, that the reader never really doubts a favorable resolution. The tone is cheerful and unapologetically anachronistic, and if the book is a little episodic, the plot a little ad hoc, it's mostly forgiven.

It's a book for those cluttered sorts of bibliophiles and collectors too. Every likable character has a house full of knicknacks and books, neglected by its owner and lovingly described. If there's a flaw in any of the primary characters (including the villain), it's the tendency to pursue knowledge for its own sake and damn the consequences. Bellairs' qualification to that is probably what got him in the YA ghetto market from there on out: a good heart can be trusted.

Keifus

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