I Read: Discovering the Weird with John Bellairs
A pleasing terror
When I was a kid, we didn’t have all that much access to speculative fiction in Singapore. Back in the early 1990s there were no major international bookstores here and Amazon hadn’t even been thought of. There were a decent number of independent booksellers who had a good deal of spec fic on their shelves but as a tween I couldn’t really afford to buy that many books.
Luckily, I had access to the library of the American Club in Singapore (my father was working for an American multinational and a corporate membership was one of his perks) which, while not that large, was really well stocked with a surprising variety of genres. This was where I first encountered John Bellairs, probably my first brush with the Weird.
It was the covers that drew me in first as a nine- or ten-year old. I don’t think I knew about Edward Gorey- The Addams Family was daily viewing for me after school (for some reason our local broadcasting company filled the 1pm-3pm slot with American comedies from the 50s and 60s)- but I was captivated.
Gorey’s beautiful, eerie, crosshatched drawings fit the mood of Bellair’s writing perfectly. He gives us a glimpse into the gray, Gothic world inside the covers.
Bellairs himself was the perfect first Weird writer for ten year old me- his stories were accessible- ten year old protagonists, but often recently bereaved. Lewis Barnavelt lost his parents in a car accident, Johnny Dixon’s father is flying jets in Korea. In the place of the absent parents we have caring if cantankerous adults. Professor Childermass, Mrs Zimmerman and the like.
Reading the stories as an adult, they’re predictably formulaic but the warmth of the characters in the mysterious demon-haunted world of 1950s America they inhabit still charms. Bellairs has a talent, too, for moments of chilling fear…
the air around Johnny heaved to an insane, feverish rhythm. His chest felt tight and his eyesight was clouded by an icy mist that wrapped itself around him. Johnny struggled for breath- the life was being pumped out of him. He was going to die. Suddenly a voice burst in on his brain, a harsh, grating, stony voice that told him he would never again meddle in things beyond his understanding.
Death is an eternal sleep, said the voice, and it said this over and over again like a cracked record.
Pretty chilling stuff for a ten-year old. And really, it’s stuff like this which gave me a taste for the Weird. I had always liked books of ghost stories and the like but Bellairs writing really drove the tropes deep into my spine, and they’ve never really let go since.
When I was in my late teens I discovered M.R. James and realized what Bellairs had been drawing on for inspiration. Like James, Bellairs set his spooky stories in settings he knew well and clearly loved and the intrusion of the Weird into these settings is what gives both writers their special spookiness. Also, like James, it’s curiosity that leads Bellairs protagonists into danger- determination to solve mysteries, to find out explanations for the Weird.
Of course, most of these stories could be resolved if the protagonist had just gone to the adults in his life and told them the full facts but that wouldn’t be much fun.
Bellairs, unlike James, always wrapped his stories up with happy endings for his young readers, but like all the best children’s writers he never talked down to them. I was legitimately scared and thrilled reading Bellairs when I was ten and even now re-reading him as an adult I maintain that he achieves the pinnacle of Weird writing- to give us ‘a pleasing terror’.