Occasionally, I just want to
read a story that scares me – not something that truly horrifies me, which is
an unpleasant experience, but something that makes me jump. Of course, there
are options in ‘grown-up’ literature – John Wyndham, as I hope my review of The Kraken Wakes made clear, can be
pretty creepy, then there’s HP Lovecraft (I found the Penguin collection The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories a
good place to start) or you could pick up one of my favourite collections, American Supernatural Tales, edited by
weird tale expert SJ Joshi, and turn straight to T.E.D Klein’s ‘The Events at
Porloth Farm’ for true terror and an annotated further reading list all in
one. But when I was six or seven years old and living in Washington DC near a
library that allowed you to take out up to twenty books at a time (I think one
of the hardest things about the move to the UK was adjusting to a measly
eight-book limit), it had to be John Bellairs.
It’s hard for me to judge how
well Bellairs is known nowadays – no-one I know has ever heard of him, but then
he is primarily a US author – but in brief,
he wrote several series of children’s horror books, a few stand-alones,
and, I think, an adult novel as well, back in the 1970s and 1980s (this site is more well informed than I will ever be.) My favourites were the
1950s-set Johnny Dixon novels, partly because The Curse of the Blue Figurine was the first Bellairs book I read,
partly because I think they are some of Bellairs’ most chilling works, and
partly because of the classic character of Professor Roderick Childermass,
Johnny’s eccentric friend (I can still remember the way Bellairs introduces us
to Professor Childermass in The Curse of
the Blue Figurine by noting that Johnny and the professor knew they would
get on because they both realised that a good chocolate cake ought to be more chocolate filling than cake; so true!) Perhaps that’s why The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, the third in the Johnny Dixon
series, was always one of my favourite Bellairs; the professor is in jeopardy
and Johnny has to save him, with the help of skeptical friend Fergie (I
remember first learning the word skeptical from this book...) and Catholic
priest Father Higgins. (As in all the best horror, Catholicism and its
trappings feature heavily in the Dixon series.)
A quick summary of the opening
of the novel will probably be helpful here. Before Professor Childermass goes
missing, he and Johnny visit the Fitzwilliam Inn in New England, where they
have the Childermass clock, one of the professor’s family heirlooms. Inside the
clock is a dollhouse room replica of his uncle’s living room, and the professor
tells Johnny about how his uncle was mysteriously found dead here on his
birthday. One of the furnishings of the room is a minature skull, which Johnny
is compelled to take with him after seeing a re-enactment of Uncle Lucius’s
death in the dollhouse in the middle of the night. Shortly afterwards, the
professor disappears – and Johnny sees a glowing jack o’ lantern face in his
window, so believes supernatural powers are involved. Dun da dun...
It’s impossible to review
books fairly that I read and loved as early as I read this series, and I’m not
100% that The Spell of the Sorcerer’s
Skull would stand up to adult scrutiny. But what I think Bellairs did teach
me – and what he still does exceptionally well – is how to scare. It amazes me still how many horror stories I read
that don’t get this basic but delicate craft right, but all the points that
Bellairs ticks off are still the things that the books that frighten me today
do well. So how does he do it?
1.
The
nameless menace. A technique that Wyndham also uses frequently,
Bellairs knows that the first rule of horror is not to personify the evil that
menaces your heroes. The imagination is so much more frightening than any
descriptions. So in The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, when Father Higgins and Johnny
are discussing the professor’s possible kidnapper, Father Higgins says “It may not even be a somebody that’s done it – from all that you’ve told
me, it is more likely to be a something that
did it. One of the powers of darkness, in other words.” I’m shivering...
2.
The
sacred defence. Although not essential, I do think that the
frequent use of crosses, holy water and other blessed objects as weapons in Bellairs
somehow adds to the fright factor; there’s something about Latin incantations
and Biblical references that makes horror more resonant. This is appallingly
done in many horror novels I have read, but Bellairs is subtle enough to pull
it off: Father Higgins manages to see off one evil spirit with a silver
crucifix he claims contains two splinters from the True Cross. (This may have
something to do with the inherent eerieness of Christianity itself, with the
emphasis on resurrection and Jesus’s thousand-year rule over a kingdom of the
saved.)
3.
Evil
as the enemy. Bellairs is fond of warlocks as villains, but
throughout most of this novel the enemy seems to be evil itself, as personified
in their antagonist Warren Windrow. This becomes more frightening when evil is
associated with some sort of operating genius, as in this passage, also from
Father Higgins: “John... it is becoming
more and more clear to me that we are dealing with some kind of incredibly evil
intelligence, a disembodied spirit that has decided to attack you and the
professor for some reason. The skull and the jack-o’-lantern face and the
scarecrow you saw on the ferryboat – they are all manifestations of that evil
mind.”
4.
Too
awful even to describe. A favourite Lovecraftian move, Bellairs
borrows this trope as well. Emphasising that the horror you are dealing with is
so dreadful that even to see it or hear about it may addle your mind forever
links to ancient ideas about knowledge as corrupting, and makes the unseen
menace even more frightening. Bellairs isn’t quite as good as this as Lovecraft, but he still uses it to effect, as when he has Higgins declare “What awful, ghastly unnameable thing is
going to happen to the poor man?”
5.
The
One Ring. Again, not an essential trope, but used to great
effect in a few horror stories I have read (as well as in Lord of the Rings which obviously isn’t part of the genre!) Johnny
becomes obsessed with the minature skull from the dollshouse, and can’t let go
of it, believing it is a good luck charm; of course, it’s leading him into even
greater peril. A similar thing happens when they first try to rescue the
professor and he won’t go with them, claiming that there is a treat prepared
for him on his birthday and he doesn’t want to miss it; they know that if he stays
in his prison too long, he’ll suffer the same fate as his Uncle Lucius. There’s
something about the willing participation in one’s own destruction which is
disturbing.
6.
The
final explanation. Bellairs is very fond of having an authority
figure, such as the professor or Father Higgins – or in a book from another
series, The Dark Secret of Weatherend, a
librarian – explain the supernatural happenings at the end of each novel.
There’s no attempt to make them credible – the explanation is couched in the same
kind of language that the rest of the book has been written in – but somehow
the scientific detachment of this explanation often makes this the scariest
moment in each novel. Try this from Professor Childermass at the end of The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, as he
explains the role the skull from the Childermass clock
played in their adventures. Uncle Lucius, the first to fall victim to the
curse of the clock, had kept Windrow’s skull in a hatbox, but, when Lucius
died: “what they found [in the hatbox]
was a teeny-tiny skull, the same one that wound up on the shelf by the
fireplace in the dollhouse room that some of us here have seen... Warren
Windrow was a young warlock. And after he had gotten his revenge on Lucius, his
evil, disembodied mind had thought up a way to pass on the curse. Aaaand, since no one in the Childermass family knew
that a full-size skull had been in the hatbox, nobody guessed that the lovely
delicate minature was a real skull!” And, on why “my father didn’t get blitzed by the power of Windrow’s skull... he
never touched it. I mean, his fingers never actually came into contact with the
filthy thing... I think Dad must have handled the skull with tweezers, and that
was what saved him. I, on the other hand, was not so lucky. My finger grazed
the skull that night in the Fitzwilliam Inn, and it nearly got me killed.” No
space to quote it all, but the final explanation usually hits all five previous
points, and then more.
When beginning this post, I
wasn’t sure that my claims for Bellairs were going to stand up to critical
scrutiny. But having finished it, I find myself tense, jumpy, and a little bit
scared, even though it’s broad daylight and there are hairdressers screeching
and dogs barking in the salon under my flat. So I feel I can say with
confidence that as far as fear goes, Bellairs is the master. Now to get hold of
a copy of The Mummy, the Will and the Crypt...
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