Bellairs Reincarnated: The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost by Brad Strickland

Back on January 15, I posted some alternative fantasy writers to help readers while away the time waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to be published July 21. One of those masters of the (little g) gothic genre recommended was John Bellairs, whose three related series are deliciously dark. In the spirit of his novels, Bellairs, who died in 1991, seems to be currently channeling new novels through the hand of author Brad Strickland, under contract with the Bellairs estate to continue writing novels in Bellairs' style and featuring his three main characters. In writing eerily similar to Bellairs' distinctive voice, Strickland completed two of Bellairs' manuscripts, wrote two more fantasies from the master's outlines, and has gone on to create whole sequels on his own.

One of the Strickland's Johnny Dixon strands is The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost, in which an idyllic vacation on Live Oak Key in Florida is marred by Johnny's encounter with a fortune teller who warns of grave danger to Johnny's father from an evil force and the appearance of an old book which morphs into a sinuous and terrifying serpent before it conceals itself in Johnny's room.

Johnny is frightened but keeps the story to himself until he returns home and tells his mentor, Professor Childermass of the warning. The Prof recognizes the hand of the visible form of Horus, an ally of his from the spirit world first met in Bellairs' time-travel tale The Trolley to Yesterday. As word comes that Johnny's father lies unconscious in an Air Force hospital, Johnny and Professor Childermass realize that the prophecy is indeed working itself out and that a powerful force from the dark side, Nyarlat-Hotep, in the form of evil pirate Damon Boudron, must be defeated before Johnny's father's soul is destroyed and his body dies.

Johnny Dixon, the Professor, and Johnny's friend Fergie use the "portkey" of the mysterious book to travel to the spirit world and defeat the evil spirit in the best fantasy style, forcing the evil one to swallow liquid from the River Lethe. As with Bellairs' own writing, Strickland succeeds in creating a plot with horrifying enemies defeated through the ordinary courage and goodness of Johnny and his mentor. Professor Childermass, like Bellairs' other adult figures, provides a humorous quirkiness and comforting guidance which allay the horror of the evil which the young boy faces.

Brad Strickland continues to write Bellairesque novels in the Johnny Dixon and Lewis Barnavelt series. Fans, particularly librarians, also hope that he will turn to the Anthony Monday sequence (which begins with The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn) as well, a series which features as mentor Miss Ells, town librarian and dabbler in things magical and mysterious.

Be Careful What You Wish For: The Book of Story Beginnings

Kristin Kladstrup's fantasy novel poses the venerable problem of the effect upon the present of time travel into the past and a deeper question about the nature of human happiness at any point on the time continuum.

The novel begins with Lucy and her parents on the way to their new home, a century-old brick farmhouse in Iowa, inherited from a maiden great-aunt. Lucy is not pleased with the transition, but is fascinated with a family mystery revealed by a letter, delivered posthumously, from her Great-Aunt Lavonne. In this letter Lavonne reminds them of the unsolved disappearance of her fourteen-year-old brother Oscar, whom she claims to have watched rowing away into an ocean which amazingly appeared around their house one night in 1914. The letter recounts a dream which Lavonne apparently had just before her death, in which Oscar calls back to his then little sister the words "Lucy will explain."

Intrigued, Lucy begins to investigate the family mystery, unearthing Oscar's journals and an ancient volume called The Book of Story Beginnings, in which Oscar had written the beginning of his disappearance story--ocean, rowboat, and all. Her father is also researching the story in Aunt Lavonne's alchemy notes without a breakthrough, until, after overhearing a money quarrel between her parents, Lucy writes the beginning of a reconciliation story about her father and mother in which her father is indeed a magician. What Lucy wishes for begins to come true, with unforeseen consequences. With the help of a potion he concocts from Lavonne's notes, her father changes into a raven and flies away over the now re-materialized ocean. The barn cat Walter reappears as the vanished Oscar himself, still dressed in his 1914 garments. Eventually Oscar and Lucy realize that they must live out both story beginnings they have written into the book and travel to the universe in which their stories are being played out to recover their own present lives.

After many complications too confusing to recount, Lucy's father is returned to his own body and the three return to the farmhouse, to the surprisingly minor consternation of Lucy's mother and relatives. Oscar, however, still has the basic problem of the time traveler. If he uses their new found magic, he can return to his family in 1914 and live out his life as if he had never disappeared. But in doing so, he takes the chance of gravely changing the lives of those in the present. If not, he must live with his nephew's family and never see his long-dead parents and siblings again. The theme of the book is revealed in a conversation with Lucy at the end of the book:

"But to be glad for what I did! It's like being glad I murdered them!" [said Oscar.]

"But you didn't murder them! They went on with their lives. They chose to be happy. They had to, even if they never forgot you, or never stopped missing you." said Lucy. "You're just choosing," she said. "You're choosing to be happy about what's happened.... The happiest endings--I think they're endings that feel like beginnings.... We're your family now, Oscar. You should choose us."

Kladstrup's theme, that indeed we all write the beginnings of our own life stories and must make the conscious choice to be happy within them, is a solid one, well realized in the full sweep of the novel. The middle of the novel, however, is a muddle of fairy-tale-like characters and subplots which go on a bit too long and resolve themselves too abruptly. Kladstrup writes much better when she is dealing with the real people and their real-life choices in the novel.

A novel which deals more tightly with the time-travel dilemma is Mary Downing Hahn's
fantasy A Time for Andrew, in which look-alike relatives swap places over an 80-year time span to prevent the first Andrew from dying of a disease for which the second Andrew has, of course, been vaccinated. Hahn, however, stays relatively clear of Kladstrup's more philosophical theme of our own roles in our personal happiness in the life stories we choose to live out.

It is a deep and unresolved question of life and literature as to whether we indeed set the stage for our own lives or whether circumstance, accident or the will of someone or something outside ourselves lays down the basic plot line of our lives. Although I wish Kladstrup had somehow managed the alternate universe subplot better, I give her points for engaging this larger theme as she did.