A little childhood-book nostalgia on a rainy November afternoon
For those of you who grew up reading John Bellairs' eerie yet oddly cozy YA novels, in which young heroes and heroines face supernatural terrors amid the Victorian houses in their quiet Midwestern towns, I highly recommend Bellairsia, a fairly comprehensive Bellairs bibliography and biography site. I especially like the map portion of the site and the pages on towns and buildings that served as models for places in the books, like the octagon house that apparently was the original for the one in The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn. I was also charmed to discover that Bellairs went to my alma mater in the 1960s, and used to hang out at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap, one of the few bars still going in Hyde Park when I was a student.
Today is one of those rainy November Saturdays where the light starts fading at 3:30 in the afternoon, which brought Bellairs' novels (and the many hours I spent reading them as a kid) irresistibly to mind. I wonder whatever became of my copy of The Curse of the Blue Figurine?
Curse of the Blue Figurine is very creepy. You inspired me to stop by the used bookshop where I have credit, & though they had no copies of CotBF, I did find The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt, and two of the later Anthony & Miss Eells novels. Were the Johnny Dixon novels your favorites? And what did you make of Lewis Barnavelt & Rose Rita Pottinger? (gosh, it’s amazing how this stuff never really leaves one’s memory…sadly, no pub quiz night is ever likely to ask me what sort of hat Rose Rita wears.)
The Johnny Dixon novels were my favorites, but (looking at the Bellairs bibliography) I missed most of the later ones. But I had a soft spot for Lewis and Rose Rita, as well — there are details I remember with great vividness, like Lewis reading about Mary Queen of Scots, and the game of cards with the Ace of Nitwits (was that in House with a Clock in its Walls, or Figure in the Shadow?), and Rose Rita’s passion for cannons.
I remember The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt as seriously scary in places (that Guardian! gah!), and CotBF as well — especially Johnny’s creepy dreams. Now I want to reread all of them one after the other.