John Bellairs and Edward Gorey

I don't know if I read The House With a Clock in Its Walls or saw the Vincent Price-hosted tv show based on it first. Either way, I read the book when I was twelve or thirteen and thoroughly enjoyed it. Many years later, in my thirties, I think, I reread it along with its sequel and several of Bellairs' other juvenile supernatural adventure books. I also read his adult fantasy novel, The Face in the Frost, but I'll write about that some other time.

Bellairs wrote three series, all similar, all setting a boy against mysteries and supernatural dangers - mostly. The Johnny Dixon and Lewis Barnavelt books all feature spooky shenanigans. The Anthony Monday books start with a straight, mundane mystery but the following three books introduce ghosts and whatnot. I imagine it was a case of Bellairs and his publisher understanding what his audience wanted.

Having just finished the first book in each series, I'm looking forward to reading more. House holds up, but the other two are even better. The Anthony Monday book, The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn is more sharply written than House and the Johnny Dixon book, The Curse of the Blue Figurine, is even better. The end is a bit rushed, but for a young adult book written for actual young adults, there's some depth to the characters and some very good atmospheric bits. Even when written in the seventies, they were period pieces, looking back to Bellairs' own Catholic childhood in the late forties and early fifties and Curse recreates that quite well. 

Something I only recognized when I read the books in my thirties was that many of the covers and some interior illustrations were done by Edward Gorey. I knew him from his animated credits for PBS's Mystery anthology series, his War of the Worlds illustrations,  and I had heard about his sets for the Broadway production of Dracula starring Frank Langella.

Apparently, Gorey and Bellairs never communicated. Gorey took on the illustrating as work-for-hire, would read the book, and then send his art to the publishers and Bellairs would review for any technical discrepancies. According to one article, the art for House came in late enough, the publisher told Bellairs he'd have to change his text as they were running to close to deadline to get Gorey to redo anything.

In an article by Matt Domino, he recounts how Gorey was more-or-less dismissive of his Bellairs illustrations and had them removed from his archives:

In fact, according to Brown, later in his life, Gorey wanted to disown his cover illustrations for Bellairs. “He called me up one day and said, ‘Let’s get all of the Bellairs work out of the archives.’ He just didn’t think it represented him and what he was trying to do. He saw it as his grunt work.”

Be that as it may, the illustrations, like most of Gorey's work are wonderful and evocative of the weird and spooky.

If you aren't familiar with Gorey's work, I recommend you find any one of his books or collections. His work is finely detailed and black & white, usually set in some sort of Edwardian or post-WWI setting, featuring strange characters and often disturbing rhymes. It's also wickedly funny.

Below are his illustrations for The House With a Clock in Its Walls. Not only are they wonderful, they're also so specific. He clearly had a good reader's instinct for the perfect moments in the story to illuminate.