(originally published at leaf-pile.blogspot.com)So I got into John Bellairs in a slightly odd way.
He materialised before me one night in the acid green light of a streetlamp on Bellenden Road!
No.
I was a regular reader of Black Carrot Secret Diaries, the blog of writer and illustrator (and demon on the ukulele) Joel Stewart. I was an office drone at the time (plus ca change) and fell in love with his stories of creative endeavour, the correct weight of paper, the search for an exact colour.
He updates his blog less often now he has a beautiful girlfriend and a steady job. Ha! Lightweight...
I don't know why Stewart isn't a bigger star in children's publishing (and illustration in general given his gorgeous work with Hans Christian Andersen). He's got the brushy elegance of Ardizzone, and the straight faced freeze framing of Edward Gorey - and I think that's the link. Looking at a photo of his studio one day, I zoomed in to read the spines of a stack of books artlessly tossed onto his overmantle: The Trolley Car to Yesterday, The House with a Clock in its Walls - and a name.
I'm pretty sure I came almost immediately the amazing Bellairsia website, and the more I discovered the more excited I got. He's really not known in the UK, though he was published here on and off in the 1960s and 1980s - I don't know why he didn't take off, because the world he writes about is so American, in ways that British kids have (in my experience) always loved: small towns, funny chocolate bars, porches and baseball games and people called things like 'Old Man Barnavelt' who smoke tobacco and dress eccentrically, who everybody calls a wizard.
In John Bellairs novels, he is!
Or maybe those things aren't popular with everybody, but I think of them as a setting I particularly enjoy. I'm thinking of Mary Rodgers (you know Freaky Friday, where the mother and daughter switch bodies and have a rotten time of it), Beverley Cleary (I suspect the Ramona books aren't as good as I remember them, but who cares), E.L. Konigsburg (my favourite of hers is a bit of a mouthful: Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth - but The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankenweiler is the classic - brother and sister run away to camp out in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art), Louise Fitzhugh (Harriet the Spy, which I read under a duvet with a torch to find out what happened after she fell through that skylight).
Except these have evil wizards, zombies and spectral beasties knocking about! What's not to love? Especially with Bellairs affectionate recycling of certain ooks and eeps of my beloved MR James, and Edward Gorey's book-covers and illustrations. Like I said yesterday, even if they're not the sort of thing you could pigeon-hole as 'crossover' fiction today, straightforwardly pleasurable adventures for young people are easy to forge and easily forgotten. The real deal are loved a long time after.
According to the message-boards and such, Bellairs is better known in the US, where he's considered something like Stephen King with training wheels. It turned out my New York friend Ian (and he has to live there forever now, just so I can keep on calling somebody 'my New York friend') was a fan: "Where were you when I was 8 and reading his books, dammit!"
We find one another in the end, don't worry...
On Sunday I read The Figure in the Shadows, in a lovely yellow-edged Yearling edition stamped Copenhagen Central RIF, but nothing will compare with first reading The House with a Clock in its Walls, waiting for Jon in the autumn darkness outside Bangor Public Library. Gwynedd Libraries have some fantastic stuff in their 'store'. The House with the eponymous clock is the house of Lewis Barnavelt's eccentric Uncle, a bearded bachelor with a flair for magic tricks and a taste for late-night gambling sessions with his neighbourhood witch, Mrs Zimmerman, and a cup of cocoa.
There aren't enough Bellairs books about these three - podgy, hapless Lewis and his comfort-loving magical relatives. But generally in a Bellairs adventure there is some kid having a rough time at school, there is someone elderly and into pipes and cake, there is something skittering about in the twilight outside your door. In the season of mists they make a good accompaniment to a strong cup of tea. Kirkus Reviews, which I think is quite respected in the States, grudgingly called Figure in the Shadows 'a nice comfy ghost story for stay-at-homes who'll be relieved to know that the grownups can yet protect them against the powers of darkness.'
Pop the kettle on.
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