What’s What: White Rock Girl

Dr. Coote crouches on the end of his bed similar to the White Rock Girl to watch the struggle between his friend, Professor Childermass, and a sinister, parasitic creature [The Drum, the Doll, and the Zombie; 121-2].

Review: House "Has A Bizarre, Creepy Feel...Didn't Make Sense"

Book review: The House with a Clock in its Walls

The Spell of the Satirist’s Skill

by Eve Tushnet (June 11, 2012)

(originally published at acculturated.com)

Dickens, Schuler & Bellairs III

We’re celebrating the 200th anniversary of celebrated author Charles Dickens’s birth this year. Born February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsmouth, England, Dickens created a plethora of memorable characters with whimsical names across a dozen major novels and numerous short stories.

Memoriam: Ray Bradbury

Author Ray Bradbury has died at the age of 91.

Author of Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Martian Chronicles (1950), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated among 20th century American writers of speculative fiction and was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.  A native of Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury lived in California where he died June 5.

BiblioFile: eReads Artwork

Johnny Dixon and Edward Gorey will always be connected because of John Bellairs’s three series of young-adult adventures, only one had the same artist for the entire run of American hardcover editions. The Barnavelt series has had five different illustrators and there were two for the Monday series, but Gorey created the wraparound dust-jacket art for all twelve Johnny Dixon books published between 1983 and 1999. Because of that there is a certain consistency to their look when the novels are displayed end-to-end. (Some people do that, we’re told.)

Review: Face "Atmosphere...Is What Makes It So Good"

Book review: The Face in the Frost

Fantasy Novels That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity

Charlie Jane Anders recently wrote a piece at io9 - a blog focusing on science, technology, and science fiction - that "everbody loves a good dark, horrible fantasy. A misanthopic adventure, in which everybody is morally compromised, and we all live and die in the dirt. But every now and then, it's nice to read a fantasy novel in which people are, you know... good."

A Good Nose is Requisite

A decade or so ago, two of John's friends, Alfred Myers and Charles Bowen, worked with us on a walk-through of Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies.  The project was to help us better understand the time and place from which it came from as well walk us through John's sense of humor in many of the jokes, puns, and satire.  Anyway, Bowen shared this remembrance during our research and we came across it again recently.  Dig in.

Reviewing Strickland: To Stand Beneath the Sun

Review: To Stand Beneath the Sun

Time Capsule: April 30, 1932

April 30, 1932 Records of eclipses have been kept since ancient times: there’s a Syrian clay tablet noting the eclipse of March 5, 1223 B.C. and a non-Blarney stone in Ireland that records an eclipse on November 30, 3340 B.C. A partial lunar eclipse on May 22, 1453, was seen during the Fall of Constantinople (no word on whether Childermass and company were aware of this on their visit) and Christopher Columbus, in his attempt to sway Jamaican natives, “predicted” a lunar eclipse for February 29, 1504 – albeit using pre-obtained knowledge (Connecticut resident Hank Morgan probably is aware of this trick, too).

'Mansion' Inspired by The Black Cat?

A fan named Matthew shared his thoughts with us on what he thought we some of Bellairs's purported inspiration for The Mansion in the Mist:

Myriad references to THE BLACK CAT (a 1934 horror film from Universal Studios, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) exist in THE MANSION IN THE MIST.  Wasn't John Bellairs a Karloff fan?  (Karloff is (subtly) alluded to too.)

That tidbit popped into mind when this was posted to CraveOnline recently:

Desire To Raze The Sanctuary That Was Tamarack Hall

There isn’t a lot to say about John Bellairs’s teaching days in Gary, Indiana, which occurred now over half a century ago. What little we’ve heard paints a pretty comical portrait of a brand-spanking new teacher taking his first steps in the world of academia.

Dickens, Schuler & Bellairs II

We’re celebrating the 200th anniversary of celebrated author Charles Dickens’s birth this year. Born February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsmouth, England, Dickens created a plethora of memorable characters with whimsical names across a dozen major novels and numerous short stories.

Bibliofile: Lewis Barnavelt Series

We recently came across a rather unique set of covers for the 12-book Lewis Barnavelt series. We’re not really sure the publisher or the format (for all we know these could be another slew of e-books...hooray) except they’re void of a lot of clutter. It’s a weird color scheme: titles labeled in light black on a dark black background with some sort of light black colored pictorial representation of something from the book. It’s sort of nice to see these – more so, to know they exist. After years of pen-and-ink hash marks and ornate color paintings, these simplistic two-tone covers are a refreshing back-to-basics approach that is both cute and clever.

Ouch. We said cute. Sorry 'bout that. Anyway...