This is fantasy reduced to its purest form. From a laugh out loud first few pages you are plunged into nightmare and horror through to a purely satisfying ending. In decades of reading fantasy, [I] know of no story that better illustrates the form. Something different than Tolkien’s idealized fairy-tale, and something better than mere horror, this is a superb book.
Prospero – and not the one you are thinking of, either – and Roger Bacon must solve the riddle of an unreadable book before that riddle and a more powerful wizard kills them. The threat is all the more real because neither you nor the characters understand it; we understand the side effects well enough. But Bellairs lets you guess what might happen unless Prospero and Bacon act. Nameless horrors can be the most frightening of all.
Bellairs died far too young, leaving only a handful of children’s books, outlines for a few more and this tale. We can only wish there were more.
Wickersham's Conscience
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