After Johnny Dixon has a run-in with school bully Eddie Tompke, Gramma Dixon helps treat Johnny's cut finger:
"As Gramma fussed over him she went on about the Tompkes and their relations, the Tadmans and the Sweets and the Schemanskes. Gramma was like that. She had lived in Duston Heights all her life, and she knew everything about everybody." - The Cure of the Blue Figurine (1983)
And now for something completely different - and unexpected: The Gargoyle in the Dump is a recently discovered, never-before-published story by John Bellairs to be published September 2015 from Open Road Media.
Professor Childermass boasts that the name Childermass is "ancient and honorable" with one of his ancestors alongside the barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta [The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull, 9].
Lewis envisions himself wearing Grampa Barnavelt's lucky coin, imagining that he was this figure [The Figure in the Shadows; 61].
I was on the mend a week or so ago from a dog bite when a flood of questions entered the mind. Would I have to get a tetanus shot? Would the dog have to get a tetanus shot? Should I have bit back? Why are idioms called idioms and not, say, qualinyms? The amount of questions reminded me, when I found my pending posts file at the Bellairsia office, that I have been meaning to post a few words about questions and answers as a way to address those pointless websites where people ask questions that they couldn't manage to find answers to themselves.
Here's your chance to vote for your favorite book in the Lewis Barnavelt series.
Rose Rita had just begun reading a book by this author about a naval captain during the Napoleonic wars [The Specter from the Magician's Museum; 35]. Lewis later reads a rousing sea adventure by the same author [The Tower at the End of the World; 78].
After sleepless nights from worrying about the Keller family in the Hawaii House, Jonathan says his nephew looks like he went a few round with this world heavyweight champion (The House where Nobody Lived; 116).
Experiencing bully problems of his own, Lewis sees an ad in the back of a comic book featuring this bodybuilder and decides to mail in the coupon with a quarter to begin his muscle building program [The Figure in the Shadows; 44].
It's the ninetieth anniversary of the death of former Marshall librarian and
John's great aunt, Victoria Monk (1869-1925). Victoria’s brother was John
Monk; his daughter, Virginia, was the mother of John Bellairs.
