Read it and Weed: The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull by John Bellairs


John Bellairs wrote gothic horror for young readers from 1972 until 1991. This meant he died one year before RL Stine’s first Goosebumps broke gothic horror down into camp and schmalz. He wrote it before Lemony Snicket drenched it in detached irony, before it was reborn as the Neflix series Wednesday. He wrote it before the modern era dictated stories feature character arcs, sympathetic backstories, and rigid adherence to outsider aesthetics. 

All that crap aside, the question remains: Is it any good? Well, it's okay, sort of. The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull is a shaggy dog of a story involving a stolen clock, a tiny skull, and a St. Anthony statue that gives oracular clues. Johnny, his best friend and a priest take a trip to a remote Maine island where it's revealed that family grudges from evil sorcerers are carried from beyond the grave. Note that you can understand all of this without knowing a thing about the main character, a blank slate known as Johnny Dixon, around whom four novels were written.  

There's not a lot of world building or explanation of magic systems, just a reliance on pre-ingrained notions of god-based good and satan-based evil, which lands John Bellairs somwhere between the Hardy Boys and Stephen King. Still, it's tense and goofy and was very popular in its day.

So: Keep or weed? If I'm here ten years I may get one kid who'd even look twice at this book. It's not even Bellairs's best book. Easy weed, right?  

Final Verdict: I threw out all the other Bellaires and this one is the only survivor. Keep.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Little Witch, by Anna Elizabeth Barrett

Image
Over 70 years ago a librarian in Brooklyn wrote a book about a little witch. It would be the only book she ever published, and it would go on to be beloved by many. It's a heartwarming tale of a little girl who doesn't want to be a witch, and that's a shame because her mother is the meanest witch in the neighborhood. All the little girl wants is to be part of the normative girls, so she sneaks off to school, and hijinks follow. In the end, though, the little girl meets her real mom (a fairy!) turns seven flowerpots back into children, and sees the old witch turned into an aardvark and sent off to the zoo. I'd say you can't make this stuff up, but Anna Elizabeth Barrett did exactly that! Verdict: I can't see any modern readers having any desire to read this book, but it's short and sometimes Halloween needs some fillers on the shelf, so I'll keep it for now.
Read more

Read it and Weed

  I work as a librarian in an international middle school. Our collection is large, and old. Many of the titles were donated by teachers who long left the building, probably happy that their ancient volumes had finally been discarded. As such, much of our collection is an archive of books kids probably aren’t interested in any more, and possibly never were. Here is a selection of books that I at first thought were worth discarding. Some were of course perfect for the discard pile. On further investigation, some of these are worthy museum pieces, windows into the mind and psyche of a bygone era. That doesn’t mean my students care to read them, of course. That’s why this is here. A swan song for books that are meant for the rubbish bin of history. 
Read more