May 02, 2005
The House With The Clock In Its Walls
I just spotted a new weblog about John Bellairs, the author of some of my favorite children’s books, including The Letter the Witch and the Ring, The Mummy the Will and the Crypt and The Curse of the Blue figurine.
Bellairs died in 1991, so there isn’t much news to report about him, but the webmasters are doing a nice job finding obscure connections. They have a link to the magazine Dolls House and Miniature Scene, which will include The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull in an upcoming roundup of dollhouses in fiction. Another post warns collectors about shady book-dealers who are selling paperbacks with hardovers pasted to them as authentic first editions. They also point to a Sims-blogger who designed a house after the mansion that was the inspiration for The House With the Clock in its Walls.
The original house is in Marshal, Michigan, the author’s hometown. It is called the Cronin House, and was assumed to be haunted by the locals. It’s a landmark now.
On the frontispiece of the first edition of the book there is an illustration of the house by Edward Gorey. I doubt that Gorey ever actually saw the Cronin house, but it’s a striking resemblance.
The writers at Bellarsia speculate that the author himself never actually set foot inside the Cronin House, though he saw it frequently.
”We wonder had he physically explored something that loomed so large in his imagination if it would have had a demystifying effect on him? Would he have written his masterpiece then?”
My grandmother was a librarian, and she introduced me to Bellairs right around the time I learned how to read. I remember this as the first time I lost my way in someone else's thoughts, and I’ve spent most of my reading life searching for that feeling. Now whenever I’m in a used bookstore I look for first editions. I own a few of them, but I’d never read them for fear of destroying those childhood impressions.
During the time was immersed in the books I had my first and only encounter with the supernatural. My mother and I were alone in the house one evening. I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed when I saw a ghostly white hand opening the storm window. I went cold and ran screaming into the living room. My mother called the police, and when an officer arrived he investigated the passage between our house and the neighbors. The gate was latched and painted shut; the dried leaves showed no sign of a disturbance. The police officer seemed frustrated with me, so I retreated to my room while my mother apologized. For the next few weeks I waited up at night, certain the hand was going to return. I was determined to keep my composure and slam the window to capture him, but nothing else happened. I never knew whether the hand was real or imagined, but after exploring Belliarsia it occurs to me that it was probably the same disembodied hand that appeared on the cover of The House With the Clock in its Walls.
