The Children's Horror Mysteries of John Bellairs

 JOHN BELLAIRS AND CATHOLIC CHILDREN’S FICTION

John Bellairs, author of numerous fantasy novels, is a beloved yet underappreciated figure in late twentieth-century fiction. Although his work is geared for adolescents, like the best children’s literature, there are no age limits to his audience. Bellairs’ work focuses on brave misfit adolescents paired with elderly friends, who use their knowledge of extremely obscure historical minutiae and Catholic ritual to battle the forces of evil. Parents in search of suitable reading material for their older children ought to look no further than Bellairs.

Bellairs’ corpus can be divided into four categories: his early work for adults, consisting of out-of-print Catholic humor and one Tolkien-inspired novel; the Lewis Barnavelt series, which focuses on the adventures of a boy wizard and his eccentric relatives; the Johnny Dixon novels, and the Anthony Monday books. Uncharacteristically for me, as an adolescent, I never read Bellairs’ adult novel The Face in the Frost or any entries in his Lewis Barnavelt series, although I did as a adult. I did, however, read each entry in the Johnny Dixon and Anthony Monday series at least ten times.

The Dixon and Monday books run along parallel themes: intergenerational friendships, the value of courage, the necessity of knowledge, the fact that a few ordinary people can be a powerful force for good given sufficient tenacity, and the power of Catholicism over diabolism.

Johnny Dixon is an undersized, bespectacled teenager who lives with his kindly grandparents, since his mother is deceased and his father is fighting in the Korean War. Life is fairly dull for Johnny until he meets the irascible, cantankerous, Professor Childermass, a hot-tempered, elderly scholar whose passions include historical curiosities, frosting-smothered cakes, and disgusting cigarettes. Despite their radically dissimilar personalities, Johnny and the Professor become friends, and when paranormal events start occurring, the two team up to save their own lives, and the world as well.

Anthony Monday is a gangly, socially awkward adolescent, whose financially insecure parents often fail to understand their son’s intellectual interests. Anthony’s best friend is the prim yet feisty librarian Miss Ells, a spirited older woman who is just as happy to attack an officious socialite as she is willing to take on the forces of darkness that keep cropping up around the local library.

Bellairs completed eight Dixon books and four Monday novels. Though all are of fine quality, the best of the Mondays are The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, a hunt for a priceless artifact, and the only one of Bellairs’ books to be devoid of the supernatural; and The Dark Secret of Weatherend, an adventure where Anthony and Miss Ells prevent apocalyptic climate change (caused by evil sorcery, not global warming). The black humor and colorful characters make it hard to pick favorites from the Dixons, but two unquestionable classics are The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, where Johnny, his friend Fergie, and the local parish priest Father Higgins try to rescue the vanished Professor; and The Trolley to Yesterday, where the Professor travels through time in an attempt to prevent the sacking of Constantinople.

The spiritual themes of these books are integral to the plot, never becoming preachy or shoehorning a salutary lesson into an awkward place. There is a rather sly pattern running throughout Bellairs’ work regarding the impotence of evil in the face of goodness. The moral of these books is that with piety, stubbornness, courage, intelligence, and well-directed righteous anger, the gates of hell shall never prevail.

Alas, Bellairs died far too young, passing away in 1991 at the age of fifty-three. A longtime fan, Brad Strickland, completed four unfinished books, and then wrote several original novels based on Bellairs’ characters. I’ve read all of Strickland's Dixon continuation novels, starting with The Drum, The Doll, and the Zombie, Strickland does a fair job of imitating Bellairs’ style, but the spiritual heart of the series is largely missing, and the characterizations aren’t quite up to par, though the books improve as the series progresses.. Another sad loss is the fact that some new editions of Bellairs’ books have jettisoned the illustrations by Edward Gorey that so perfectly captured the atmosphere of the stories.

Chestertonian parents ought to make sure that the works of John Bellairs have a prominent place on their children’s reading lists. The unique blend of horror, humor, mystery, and catechizing is unparalleled in fiction.

–Chris Chan

An earlier version of this article appeared in Gilbert!