John Bellairs

It's a fun Halloween story.

Um, and it's, it's, it's in the tradition of John Bellairs, for anyone who's wondering.

If, if you ever read, um, The House With the Clock in Its Walls, for instance.

Mm.

I was scared of other kids, and adults, and talking in public, and I was just a very frightened person.

And, um, and I thought, well, if I can get through, uh, if I, if I read a scary story, 'cause I'd read, like, John Bellairs books, and Christopher Pike books, and R.L. Stine books.

If I can read a scary book, that'll be better than a scary movie.

Like, that'll be less scary.

And as we were there, I saw this amazing house on the grounds, and I asked her who it belonged to.

It's my, John Bellairs' Gothic dream house.

Does anyone remember House with a Clock in Its Walls? Yeah, that book on the, the house on the cover with the widow's walk, you know, pure Gothic.

It's like that house.

innocent.Which makes the pivot to our next book from the 1960s so incredibly jarring but necessary.

Because if Anderson scaled the horror up to the level of mythic doom, John Bellairs decided to scale the horror all the way down to something much more intimate, domestic, and strangely hilarious.

We are looking at his 1969 novel, The Face in the Frost.

Bellairs is mostly remembered today for his young adult Gothic mysteries, like The House with a Clock in Its Walls.

Don't rely on a map to track the armies.

Just let his strange political nouns settle in your mind until the context becomes clear.

Use John Bellairs as a palate cleanser.

It is proof that high-stakes fantasy can be brilliantly, effectively short.