House, Bellairs’s first novel for children—his breakthrough book—was actually his fourth. Immediately preceding it was the (sadly out of print*) dark fantasy The Face In The Frost, which itself made a splash through its combination of horror, a deft, loving satire of fantasy conventions, and an often goofy sense of humor.
There is a whole lot to be written about Bellairs’s evolution as an author, as his books became a touch formulaic as time went on; there’s a sort of manic comedic energy in Frost and Clock that quickly disappears from his writing. But for now, I’m going to look at Frost in a vacuum.
The Face In The Frost is the story of Prospero the wizard (no, not that one) and his friend/sidekick Roger Bacon. Prospero becomes aware of some dark and mysterious power arrayed against him; and he and Roger set out to find and stop it. And… that’s pretty much it. The book is closer to a novella than anything else, clocking in at under 150 pages of very large type.
Plot is not a strength of the book. Basically the entire story is Prospero walking north, evading the occasional trap set for him by his quarry. There’s an element of mystery to the whole thing, which helps to drive the story early on, but Prospero and Roger figure out what they’re up against relatively quickly. Even the book’s resolution is… not perfunctory exactly, but it’s not terribly satisfying either.
But nonetheless I think that The Face In The Frost is an absolute masterpiece, and the reason for this lies in Bellairs’s unparalleled ability to conjure atmosphere and horror. Basically, this book is creepy as hell.
Here’s a very early passage, when Prospero is just beginning to sense that something is wrong:
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This one paragraph is a pretty good microcosm of how Bellairs goes about building up the creepiness. “Dark greenish storm-twilight” is a really fantastic turn of phrase, and “unnatural dusk” is nicely evocative, too. But the leaves, I think, hanging “like carved ornaments,” are the most important part of this paragraph.
The rest of the paragraph is fairly basic, if very well deployed, atmospheric details. But Bellairs has a real flair for similes like this. Here’s a quick list of things that come immediately to mind for me when I read that: heaviness; stillness; something alive and now not-alive; a copy of something; there are some tenuous associations with graves, gravestones, tombs, etc, that come to mind, even if you don’t generally see literal ornaments hanging on gravestones.**
Note, also, how the word flat works with the subsequent clouds that “seemed to press down on the… house.” Flat very subtly introduces the impression that the color has been somehow flattened. And so the oppressive feeling brought about by the “thick-piled clouds” is magnified. Actually, if we look at the language Bellairs uses throughout the paragraph, it all contributes to this feel of oppressive, silent foreboding: descended, hung, muted, flat, thick-piled, press down. Then of course there’s unnatural and strangely, which serve to qualify the feeling of oppression even if neither word actually directly comments on it.
From a little later, here’s a longer excerpt that highlights another of Bellairs’s strengths, the ability to tap into everyday fears and magnify them:
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Who hasn’t at one time been struck by how an empty house is creepy? Or the brief feeling that someone’s lurking in the shadows around you at night? And of course, it’s literally a dark and stormy night.
From later in the book, here are Prospero’s first impressions of a forest that is rumored to be haunted (an evil wizard was killed there by the residents of a nearby town):
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There’s actually quite a lot going on in this quick passage. Bellairs does something interesting here in that he’s able to describe something that’s quite ordinary in a way that’s just a touch unsettling. “It did not look haunted,” of course, reiterates that fact that it definitely is. And “crowded, textured, interwoven” brings to mind a certain wildness and, perhaps, danger. Both of these lend a bit of agency to the forest—it’s a living thing, and by not appearing haunted it is essentially trying to deceive Prospero.
Now look at the types of green Bellairs describes: a “light, bleached, papery, yellow-green” and “dark, wet, inky green.” Bleached and papery bring to mind age and desiccation, and when used to describe “yellow-green” the effect is one of sickliness and age. At the far end of the spectrum we have the green that is “dark, wet [and] inky” which is not at all evocative of a lively, verdant forest; but rather things like blackness, night, caves, creeping things. Finally we have the trees themselves—a list of four tall, straightforward, strong things, but wrapped up with “stubby kinked mulberry trees.” “Stubby” and “kinked” are the important things here—they bring to mind something squat and twisted and ugly. And so Bellairs has described this forest—which does not look at all haunted—in precisely such a way as to make it seem unnatural and sinister.
I’ll close with a final passage, describing the gate into that same haunted forest:
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This is Bellairs using more conventional horror imagery: weathered statues with fearful expressions. It’s an obviously grotesque image. There’s nothing subtle about it (although “rain-eaten” is a nice touch, as is the unnatural silence and ease of opening the gate).
Bellairs is very adept with this sort of straightforward Gothic imagery. And there’s plenty of it in the book—the two wizards are traveling through a partially-ruined medieval countryside, run-down castles and abandoned churches and weathered gargoyles and whatnot abound. But his real genius lies in his grasp of the subtleties of language and meaning, of connotation and denotation. His language builds on itself, working with the more obvious tools of Gothic horror to evoke an eerie, supernatural atmosphere that has yet to be matched by anything I’ve read.
FOOTNOTE TO NOTHING: Bellairsia contains a book’s worth of biographical and bibliographical information, as well as a frequently updated blog.
*Does a Kindle edition count as being in print? I guess sort of. By the way, outside of the environmental benefits, I think that’s the single biggest benefit of e-books: nothing will ever go out of print now.
**I suppose it’s possible that some people will think of Christmas ornaments here, killing the mood. It’s a testament to Bellairs’s writing ability that that’s not really what comes to mind.
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