Enter the hero.
When we first meet Lewis Barnavelt in The House with a Clock in its Walls (1973) (p.3), he’s riding a bus to his new home in Michigan, having just gone through the traumatic stress of losing both his parents. Even without a lot of detective work, we know Bellairs is pulling autobiographic elements from his past to create Lewis:“I was overweight and the other kids thought I was weird and I liked to read. I would walk...between my home and Catholic school and have medieval fantasies featuring me as the hero.”“The heroes of my books are loners and outsiders because that's the way I felt when I was a kid: if you're fat, brainy, can't play sports, and are physically cowardly, you don't fit in.”“The common ordinary stuff - the bullies, the scaredy-cat kid Lewis, the grown-ups, the everyday incidents - all come from my own experience.”
Many people have said they identify with Bellairs’s characters, either by being alone a lot or being a bookworm or not getting along with others their own age. It’s a bit early in the story to see Lewis’s shining moments, but how many people see this timid and insecure young man riding by himself in the back of a bus and know how he feels or what he is going through? Do younger fans still see something of themselves in Lewis?
The book notes Lewis is only 10 and we’ve already noted the year is 1948 – meaning his birthday would be around 1938, much like Bellairs himself.
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