A little too heavy on the religion this time around with Johnny Dixon's priest friend doling out Catholic voodoo against a vengeful ghost but still a fun read even if you forget to say your prayers. ( )

When Johnny Dixon and his friend Professor Childermass discover an old heirloom clock, the terror begins . The professor suddenly vanishes, and Johnny is left to solve the mystery - alone.

Another incoherent story by John Bellairs. The Gorey illustration on the front cover, with the caved in roof is so right and so New England. I go by just such a roof pretty frequently. The appeal is the 1950s New England setting...the gothic parts are quaint. ( )

Travel back to 1952, when an older man could befriend an adolescent boy and there wasn't anything untoward about it. Johnny Dixon and Professor Childermass are waylaid in an inn by a snowstorm when they discover a clock with an elaborate and unsettling vignette display. Soon afterwards, the professor magically vanishes and Johnny must enlist the aid of his friend Byron "Fergie" Ferguson and an Irish Catholic priest named Father Higgins to help track him down.

As with his Lewis Barnavelt trilogy, Bellairs seems to have felt the third book was the time to shake things up and remove one of the main characters for most of the story. It's fine, I guess, but I liked the professor much better than Father Higgins and would have preferred to have had him around. I was also a little uncomfortable with the role of religion in this book. Earlier in the story, even Father Higgins appears to be something of a skeptic, but by the end a crucifix (that contains pieces of the "true cross") is burning evil books to ash. Yeah, I know it's all just magic but the fact that it's based on a "real" (as in widely believed today) religion made it feel a bit different. A little like proselytizing, though not as bad as Madeleine L'Engle's books. If I was giving this book to a child, I'd make sure to explain to him or her that it was all equally made up.

All that said, I still think highly of Bellairs' writing. He excels at creating an atmosphere that is spooky even to an adult, and shows a high level of literacy--both linguistic and cultural--for a book aimed at grade schoolers. ( )

Johnny goes on a New Hampshire vacation with his neighbor, Professor Childermass. They happen to stay at an inn that contains the Childremass clock, reputed to be haunted. When Johnny wakes in the night and is drawn to the clock to watch a horrible death in it's diorama, then Professor Childermass disappears, Johnny knows that everything is connected to the tiny human skull he's found. ( )