(Originally published at
scallopskulledskald.blogspot.com)
Having misplaced my paperback copy of The Face in the Frost, and curious about it's unfinished sequel, I purchased Magic Mirrors: The High Fantasy and Low Parody of John Bellairs, which includes The Face in the Frost, the sequel The Dolphin Cross, and two earlier Bellairs works- St Fidgeta and Other Parodies and The Pedant and the Shuffly. John Bellairs was perhaps best known for his supernatural thrillers for children, starting with The House with a Clock in its Walls. Magic Mirrors begins with The Face in the Frost, published in 1969, a fantasy novel, which manages to be comic and unsettling by turns. The book starts out cheerfully enough, with an elaborate description of the bizarre home of Prospero, the book's protagonist, which would do a Jack Vance proud:
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Prospero's peaceful, contemplative life is interrupted by some mildly off-putting phenomena, and the visit of his friend Roger Bacon, who has come to consult with Prospero about a mysterious book that Prospero had asked him about (there's a funny aside as Roger narrates his misadventure with his brazen head). The two embark on an investigation into the provenance of the book, which takes them to the library of another eccentric wizard (a comic interlude, with another humorous allusion to HPL's works), where they realize that an old colleague of Prospero's is behind the phenomena which have been hounding him. This precipitates a perilous errand to obtain a magical bauble co-created by Prospero and his former acquaintance.
After the whimsical opening, Bellairs plunges the reader into some truly unsettling scenes, as the sorcerous attacks on Prospero increase in intensity, and their focus shifts from unnerving the wizard to a more lethal bent. This particular scene gives a taste of Bellairs' ability to put a subtle chill up the reader's spine:
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As the narrative moves along, the protagonists realize that their enemy has stumbled upon sorceries that have the power to warp the fabric of reality- night terrors abound, causing a frightened populace to dismantle the social order. In one particularly horrible scene, Bellairs shows that evil need not take a sorcerous form:
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It's tempting to make the point that this was written while the Vietnam War raged, (it was published in the year that the investigations into the My Lai massacre took place so news of My Lai could not have been a direct influence), but, sadly, John Bellairs is not around to verify if this was meant allegorically.
After that particular bit of dialogue, the supernatural horrors seem a little less horrific, although Bellairs still describes them with his characteristic flair:
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If there's one flaw with The Face in the Frost, it is that the climactic confrontation takes place off-stage. At one point, in a twist that will have some readers cringing (but which I loved), a fleeing Prospero stumbles into a most unusual place, and (less felicitously, though Madonna would approve of this part) enlists additional aid in his efforts. The end is rather abrupt, which is also the major flaw of The House with a Clock in its Walls.
While Magic Mirrors, at $25, is pretty steep in price (I prefer paperbacks anyway), I'd recommend it for any fans of Bellairs' young-adult fiction, fans of the "Harry Potter" books (which I still haven't read), or fans of "weird fiction" who don't mind comic relief (Bellairs' protagonists are the sort of scholarly types that HPL wrote about, though they know what to do about Nameless Horrors).
Perhaps, I'll tackle the other portions of the book in a later post. I've been going on about this book for quite some time.
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