(originally published at fictioncircus.com)
If you didn't love John Bellairs as a child, we're not exactly not friends any more, but I may not come to your birthday party. Sorry.
John Bellairs, for all those of you who are now alone on your birthday, wrote YA novels about young Catholic teens and pre-teens, more often than not orphans, beset by terrible spiritual forces against which they fought with the aid of crotchety old men.
You are now thinking: "That sounds terrible. That sounds like any number of awful YA fantasy novels." You are wrong because in your heart you are evil and cold. John Bellairs' books work because of two things:
(1) The richly-detailed texture of life as a quiet religious-minded introvert in freezing, aging New England and Michigan towns of the 1940s and 50s. There are paper-collection drives headed by the local nuns, and there are reeking opera houses next to five and ten stores on deserted main squares named after long-forgotten Civil War heroes, and there are smoky poker games held by members of the local Magician's Union because this is the North and labor is king. This is the best possible setting for a story about wizards. New England is steeped in death already!
(2) John Bellairs's imagination is ridiculous and powerful. Imagine the best time travel story you can think of. Seriously, do it now. We will wait for you.
Okay. Is it killing Hitler? Is it killing Hitler, then realizing that you can't kill Hitler because it creates paradoxes? Is it realistically any better than that?
Here is John Bellairs's time travel story, The Trolley To Yesterday. (Note to publishers: make your books look like this if you want kids who read too much to think they are totally awesome. More minimalist pictures of old men whose eyes you cannot see leading gawky adolescents into darkness; more falcons)
Old Professor Childermass is doing renovation work on his basement when he finds an abandoned electric trolley station stretching off into the unknown depths of Massachusetts. He realizes in short order that this is a time machine built by God-knows-who, some previous owner of the house, and he decides that the best possible use of that time machine is to go back and prevent the siege of Constantinople so that Byzantine culture could flourish further into the Renaissance. He also travels with the physical manifestation of the god Horus, which is a tacky plastic souvenir falcon that he has discovered at some previous, undisclosed point in the story. Also there are moody Templar ghosts milling around somewhere.
The best-known of his novels is probably The House With A Clock In Its Walls, which delivers on what the title promises: there is a house, owned by a kindly magician named Jonathan Barnavelt for good measure, and by God there is a clock in its walls. When the clock gets wound up, the world ends. All of this wouldn't be a problem, since the wizard who constructed the clock died before he could actually activate it. But then Jonathan Barnavelt's nephew, the young orphaned questioning Catholic who loves reading Stoddard's histories and eating chocolate bars, decides to impress the popular kid in school by swiping Jonathan's magic books and summoning a dead woman's soul back from Hell, with predictably fun consequences for everyone.
In short: Bellairs writes books for kids, books stuffed with magic and an irreverent misuse of Catholic iconography. And until he died in 1991 and was replaced by the significantly less fun Brad Strickland, Bellairs was the best in the world at producing YA fantasy that actually felt like the product of someone's alarming childhood and well-developed fanciful muscles.
That is what we all know about John Bellairs, if we are good people. But DID YOU KNOW that Bellairs didn't start out wanting to be a YA writer? That he thought he would be the next Tolkien, the next C.S. Lewis? That he was forced to do a quick hatchet job on The House With A Clock In Its Walls to turn it into a book for young readers, because no one was willing to publish his work otherwise? That like rival children's book great Roald Dahl, Bellairs pretty much hated kids and schemed every day to publish the sequel to his one adult fantasy novel, The Face In The Frost--schemes that eventually drove him to an early grave???
And DID YOU KNOW that The Face In The Frost, the only non-YA book Bellairs would ever admit to having published, was not his first published work at all? That Bellairs's first published work was in fact a slim volume of Catholic whimsy, Saint Fidgeta And Other Parodies, New York: Macmillan, 1966? That the flap copy describes the book as "one of the merriest books in many a moon"? That the copyright on one of the pieces in the book is held by the Thomas More Association?
The book has been out of print for roughly forty years. Perhaps this is right, perhaps this is wrong--the book has the feeling of something written by a person who has just dropped out of seminary school and is considering his options. It is, in the end, now your decision. Due to my association with an unwholesome used bookstore in the heart of the pagan island of Manhattan, I have acquired a copy, and I am posting a copyright-violating excerpt.
John Bellairs, for all those of you who are now alone on your birthday, wrote YA novels about young Catholic teens and pre-teens, more often than not orphans, beset by terrible spiritual forces against which they fought with the aid of crotchety old men.
You are now thinking: "That sounds terrible. That sounds like any number of awful YA fantasy novels." You are wrong because in your heart you are evil and cold. John Bellairs' books work because of two things:
(1) The richly-detailed texture of life as a quiet religious-minded introvert in freezing, aging New England and Michigan towns of the 1940s and 50s. There are paper-collection drives headed by the local nuns, and there are reeking opera houses next to five and ten stores on deserted main squares named after long-forgotten Civil War heroes, and there are smoky poker games held by members of the local Magician's Union because this is the North and labor is king. This is the best possible setting for a story about wizards. New England is steeped in death already!
(2) John Bellairs's imagination is ridiculous and powerful. Imagine the best time travel story you can think of. Seriously, do it now. We will wait for you.
Okay. Is it killing Hitler? Is it killing Hitler, then realizing that you can't kill Hitler because it creates paradoxes? Is it realistically any better than that?
Here is John Bellairs's time travel story, The Trolley To Yesterday. (Note to publishers: make your books look like this if you want kids who read too much to think they are totally awesome. More minimalist pictures of old men whose eyes you cannot see leading gawky adolescents into darkness; more falcons)
Old Professor Childermass is doing renovation work on his basement when he finds an abandoned electric trolley station stretching off into the unknown depths of Massachusetts. He realizes in short order that this is a time machine built by God-knows-who, some previous owner of the house, and he decides that the best possible use of that time machine is to go back and prevent the siege of Constantinople so that Byzantine culture could flourish further into the Renaissance. He also travels with the physical manifestation of the god Horus, which is a tacky plastic souvenir falcon that he has discovered at some previous, undisclosed point in the story. Also there are moody Templar ghosts milling around somewhere.
The best-known of his novels is probably The House With A Clock In Its Walls, which delivers on what the title promises: there is a house, owned by a kindly magician named Jonathan Barnavelt for good measure, and by God there is a clock in its walls. When the clock gets wound up, the world ends. All of this wouldn't be a problem, since the wizard who constructed the clock died before he could actually activate it. But then Jonathan Barnavelt's nephew, the young orphaned questioning Catholic who loves reading Stoddard's histories and eating chocolate bars, decides to impress the popular kid in school by swiping Jonathan's magic books and summoning a dead woman's soul back from Hell, with predictably fun consequences for everyone.
In short: Bellairs writes books for kids, books stuffed with magic and an irreverent misuse of Catholic iconography. And until he died in 1991 and was replaced by the significantly less fun Brad Strickland, Bellairs was the best in the world at producing YA fantasy that actually felt like the product of someone's alarming childhood and well-developed fanciful muscles.
That is what we all know about John Bellairs, if we are good people. But DID YOU KNOW that Bellairs didn't start out wanting to be a YA writer? That he thought he would be the next Tolkien, the next C.S. Lewis? That he was forced to do a quick hatchet job on The House With A Clock In Its Walls to turn it into a book for young readers, because no one was willing to publish his work otherwise? That like rival children's book great Roald Dahl, Bellairs pretty much hated kids and schemed every day to publish the sequel to his one adult fantasy novel, The Face In The Frost--schemes that eventually drove him to an early grave???
And DID YOU KNOW that The Face In The Frost, the only non-YA book Bellairs would ever admit to having published, was not his first published work at all? That Bellairs's first published work was in fact a slim volume of Catholic whimsy, Saint Fidgeta And Other Parodies, New York: Macmillan, 1966? That the flap copy describes the book as "one of the merriest books in many a moon"? That the copyright on one of the pieces in the book is held by the Thomas More Association?
The book has been out of print for roughly forty years. Perhaps this is right, perhaps this is wrong--the book has the feeling of something written by a person who has just dropped out of seminary school and is considering his options. It is, in the end, now your decision. Due to my association with an unwholesome used bookstore in the heart of the pagan island of Manhattan, I have acquired a copy, and I am posting a copyright-violating excerpt.
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