The Curse of the Blue Figurine

The first of the Johnny Dixon books is now available on Amazon as an ebook! The only reason to own a paper version is if you can find one with the original Gorey artwork, and I'm sure one day I'll get one. In the mean time, it was nice to reread it. This is actually one of the creepier Bellairs books, and I remember that I don't own an original Gorey copy because when I read my friend Jacob's in elementary school, it badly frightened me. I own originals of all of the other Bellairs books, though.

It was interesting reading this on the iPad because the fictional Duston Heights in the book is actually Haverhill Massachusetts, so I could go back and forth between the book and the map, finding the exact street Johnny is walking down. Because I've walked through Haverhill several times, I even have pictures of some of the places in the book, like the Merrimack river off of Water street. ( )

After his neighbor the eccentric professor tells Johnny a ghost story about a priest who once practiced black magic and now haunts the local church, Johnny kinda-sorta accidentally steals a blue Egyptian figurine from the church's basement. Is it just the harmless trinket it appears to be, or is there a reason why ever since Johnny picked it up, bad things keep happening to the kid who bullies him?

Unlike The House with a Clock in Its Walls, which I read a few weeks ago, this one didn't have quite enough spooky atmosphere and excitement to make me more or less forget that I was reading something clearly aimed at kids. And the ending isn't as good, either; it wraps up the main story a little too abruptly and then tacks on a little too much "here's what just happened" exposition afterward. Still, it's a fun little tale, with a nice mixture of menace and mystery. I probably would have really loved it when I was eight or nine, and it's still fairly enjoyable even now. ( )

The Curse of the Blue Figurine is the first in the series of Johnny Dixion books by John Bellairs.

Set in 1950s Massachusetts, Johnny Dixon is living with his grandparents while his father is off fighting in the war. He befriends his neighbor, Professor Childermass, and life seems to be going smoothly between school, chess games with the professor and listening to his favorite radio programs. The professor has told Johnny a story about a wicked priest that haunts his church, but Johnny thinks little of it...at first.

One day, while trying to avoid a school bully, Johnny sets off into the basement of his church and discovers a statue and a note that seem connected to the priest the professor told him about. He takes it home with him to further investigate it. One day at church, Johnny meets an unusual man who listens to Johnny's story of the blue figurine, and encourages him to use to to fight off his fears of the school bully....and only too late does Johnny realize what he has done...

This was a good book. It was the first in the Johnny Dixon series, so it isn't my favorite (no Fergie yet!), but still has a good scare factor. If you are a fan of John Bellairs previous work, you will enjoy this one! ( )

I will never forget how sacred I was the first time I read this. I was eight, and not much exposed to scary books, and especially not ones like this. I still think it's a pretty creepy book twenty years later. It doesn't give me nightmares anymore, and it's creepy in a good way more than not, but it's still definitely creepy. There's a really fine evil ghost, there are a couple of really nice dramatic scenes with settings you just can't forget, and everything turns out pretty well in the end. As I've said elsewhere, John Bellairs is still pretty much all I need in the scary books line. And you can learn a lot of real stuff from them, about history, religion, folklore and geography. ( )

John Bellairs' _The Curse of the Blue Figurine_ is the first book in the series of adventures of Johnny Dixon, a young man of Duston Heights, Massachusetts, and his eccentric friend, the knowledgeable Professor Childermass. Johnny finds in the musty basement of his local church a mysterious blue figurine, apparently Egyptian, along with a curse that anyone who removes the figurine from the church will be visited by the vengeance of Remigus Baart, an evil former priest. Of course, Johnny does remove the cursed figurine, and finds that the ghost stories he's been told are true.

As a young man, I always found Bellairs' tales gripping and thrilling--it would be fair to say they helped turn me into a reader of all books--and as I've become older I still find much there to appreciate. Bellairs had a seemingly vast collection of weird facts and illustrative details that brought his stories to life, even though they generally take place thirty or forty years or so before they were published. Bellairs, as easily as any adult horror writer, creates an atmosphere that is not merely exciting but also chilling, and it's easy to imagine them happening to the reader. Dixon, like Bellairs' other main protagonists Lewis Barnavelt and Anthony Monday, is believable and sympathetic, his real life problems effortlessly mixed with his supernatural exploits.

That being said, I've always found the Johnny Dixon stories less satisfying than the others. I've always felt that the outline of the tales is more easily identifiable, easier to see through certain cracks in the story. Certainly all of Bellairs' books--any those of any other writer--follow an outline, but the Johnny Dixon books appear a bit more generic. In fact, the entire novel _The Curse of the Blue Figurine_ is very easily seen to be a re-hash of _The House with a Clock in Its Walls_, from the themes to the character motivation to the ultimate climax, which is _extremely_ similar to _The House...._. Although on the one hand, you can find these themes throughout all of Bellairs' books--when the formula works, it works--but the Johnny Dixon stories, including _The Curse...._, are rather more threadbare.

Johnny Dixon is a likeable, courageous and intrepid hero, likewise Professor Childermass, but Lewis Barnavelt and Anthony Monday, and their respective companions-in-arms, have better written adventures. Three-and-a-half stars. ( )