(originally published at theeastincollection.blogspot.com)
Despite the fact that I am, to my knowledge, completely alone in my experience and appreciation for the children's author John Bellairs his novels have come to occupy a poignant and terrifying position in my literary development.
In my elementary years I had been all but obsessed with the popular book series of the time known as Goosebumps by the pseudo-author R.L. Stine. The series was fun and satisfied the prepubescent need for thrills along with the illusion that reading such stories somehow undermined the parental establishment. But after Monster Blood IV I began to recognize the formula upon which the series was based and their exciting glamor began to fade. It was around this time that I began to notice a certain book being advertised in the Scholastic Book Fair flyer. I had nothing to go on besides the cover but it appeared far more terrifying than anything Stine's imagination could conjur up.
The book was titled The House With the Clock in its Walls and though Bellairs' intended audience was similar to that of Stine the thrills and chills as well as the poignancy of the bildungsroman (protagonist's coming-of-age) made Goosebumps look like bland oatmeal. In retrospect I find it somewhat humorous that my middle school, a conservative protestant organization, was the very institution that handed out the Book Fair flyers. At the time it was the popular response of the overprotective parents of the school's students to make doubly sure that the dastardly Goosebumps series did NOT find its way into the susceptible paws of their little foo-foos, but their sensors failed to catch the presence of this novel, probably due to a lack of awareness. Had they known the content of Bellairs' stories (and had they been more popular, I being the only person I know to have read him) a similar stink to that of the Mid-American Christian response to the supposedly demonic content of the Harry Potter series would have been made.
I personally have always maintained that Bellairs' stories were the aesthetic precursors to Rowling's books. The House with the Clock in its Walls tells the story of a young boy named Lewis Barnavelt, orphaned at a young age and sent to live with his uncle Jonathan and his uncle's friend named Mrs. Zimmerman, both of whom turn out to be amiable users of magic. The story that unfolds is undoubtedly familiar: an evil wizard, long since considered dead, has hidden away a secret device that will allow him to return from the grave to wreck havoc upon the living. Bellairs' wizard preceded Voldemort by nearly thirty years.
It is hard to say exactly what it was that made Bellairs' novel stick so much richer a chord with my sense of the macabre than those of Stine. Both authors had a tendency toward the formulaic plot and fairly standard narrative styles (from what I remember). Perhaps the reason I found The House With the Clock in its Walls so much more effective in portraying an accurate presentation of terror was his use of darkness. In many ways Stine's novels had a tendency to reveal the final trick at his novels' conclusions and even though this often presented itself in some final contrived twist, repetition from novel to novel made the technique lose its effect. Bellairs, on the other hand, was on intimate terms with darkness and the unknown.
In each of his novels a mythology is built around the antagonist, often involving a particular talisman, a spooky location, and some echo of his or her dastardly personality. But this was the extend of the portrayal of those ghosts. Like so many early Christian martyrs the legend that grows out of their death becomes more powerful than their corporeal existence could possibly have been, albeit in a far more sinister and demonic manner. Often the legend would be passed to the main character (i.e.. Lewis Barnavelt or one of his analogues) through an older, wiser character who left out just enough to get Lewis' imagination running, along with that of the reader. So when a ghostly shadow with red eyes appears in the graveyard it carries with it not only the terror of the moment defined mostly by the hazy and ambiguous atmosphere in which imagination may run wild, but the terror that the trajectory in which those imaginings has been pointed. The figure behind the gravestone is not simply the horrific blackness of the unknown; it is still this because its features are obscured, but because the reader has begun to connect the mythology of the dead wizard (for this is often the type of antagonist Bellairs uses) with this new manifestation.
Keenly put; Bellairs knew how to tell stories. My best illustration occurred when I was probably in sixth grade. Up until fourth grade I had devoured every R.L. Stine book available in pursuit of the thrill that I know I might regret. Up until that point I had read plenty of 'scary' stories but the inherent campiness of Stine's books would permanently keep the horror bar quite low; nothing he wrote ever kept me up at night. One night, after spending most of the day reading of the exploits of one of Bellairs' protagonists as he wandered the maze of a vast and abandoned mansion alone at night in search of a talisman that would allow him to defeat the ghost of the mansion's undead master, I was attempting to go to sleep. But in that halfway point, the twilight of waking, the darkness that had surrounded the novel's protagonist began to creep over my brain, taking shape but remaining without a definite form. I began to sense what Anthony Monday (the antagonist) must have sensed always just beyond his view in the blackness of unlit staircases and creeping beneath the rugs in dusty corridors. Somewhere out of this darkness a hooded figure reached out with a tentacled hand to pull me into the black madness when I awoke, trembling with adrenaline and completely unable to peel my eyes away from the door of my childhood walk-in closet (which is another issue altogether). That night I kept my reading lamp on and read old issues of MAD Magazine until the sun came up. The experience was terrifying but effectively illustrated the art of trusting your audience's imagination to provide its own version of fear.
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