Review: Lamp "Creepy Things. Spooky Sounds. Delicious Shivers, You Know?"

Book review: The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb

In typical young-adult writing style, there aren't a lot of unnecessary details. Things start to happen pretty quickly. Creepy things. Miss Eells, an elderly woman, and Anthony Monday, a gawky teenager, acquire an old lamp. And soon after that, strange things start to happen. Spooky sounds. Ghosts with cobwebbed faces. Scrabbling unseen fingers at the door. And a dead janitor, white and papery, with cobwebs over his face.

I remember that there are a few different heroes in these books. Or duos, actually. My favorite was Johnny Dixon and Professor Childermass (I realize now why I made the Bellairs connection with Jonathan Strange -- one of the characters in Strange was named Childermass). They are in the other book that I got, which I'll read later today after I finish studying and such.

Anyway. As an adult, there were so many unanswered questions in this book. Was the old man really a warlock? Why was the tomb so mysteriously set up? What was the ghost? Why did it kill the janitor? Why was it haunting the lamp in the first place? But this is a short YA book, and things don't always get answered as deeply as we'd like. I have read that Bellairs wrote a few adult novels as well, and I think I need to get my hands on them. I have a feeling that 2008 is going to be the year that I remembered how much I love, adore, need to read.

 
Daphne

Somewhere I Have Never Traveled