John Bellairs

Johnny and Fergie are worried. Professor Childermass has been acting weird. Very weird. In this sixth Johnny Dixon mystery, the two boys sneak over to the professor's house to investigate, and what they find in the process is more amazing than usual: a talking statue, the ghosts of long-dead Crusaders, and a rickety old trolley that turns out to be a time machine. Soon, our three heroes have traveled back to Constantinople in 1453. The Turks are invading...

Professor Childermass's brother Peregrine has left behind a huge inheritance-a mansion, ten million dollars, and a cryptic riddle that might save the world from a madman. The only catch is that the professor must stay on the estate up in Maine for the entire summer. Johnny Dixon and his friend Fergie decide to come along to keep the professor company, but little do they know the dangerous magic that awaits them there. As they try to decode the strange...

Johnny Dixon and Professor Childermass are visiting a New Hampshire inn, and inside that inn is a clock. It's called the Childermass Clock. Inside the clock there is a tiny dollhouse room, an exact replica of the professor's childhood home. And on one of the shelves in that tiny room is a tiny skull. Inside that skull is something evil. In this third Johnny Dixon mystery, Johnny takes the skull to try to solve the murder of the professor's granduncle,...

By donating a box full of strange objects, Professor Childermass gets his young friend Johnny Dixon a summer job at the Gudge Museum. Everything seems okay as Johnny mops the floors and dusts the artifacts. That is, until a sinister man named Mattheus Mergal shows up looking for the one item the professor held back to keep safe-a wooden hand carved by the evil wizard Esdrias Blackleash. If Mergal gets the hand, he'll be able to bring back his long-dead...

From his adventures in The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn teenager Anthony Monday returns to take on a storm of sorcery. Anthony can always count on his friend, sixty-eight-year-old librarian Miss Eells, to break up Hoosac's hot summer days with some adventure or other, but this one takes the cake. On their way to get ice cream, they make a side trip to the abandoned mansion of the late J. K. Borkman, a once rich and weird eccentric who was...

Anthony Monday doesn't have many friends, and his home life is a wreck. But he does have Miss Eells, the librarian at the Hoosac Public Library, and he has an adventure waiting for him right around the corner. When Miss Eells gives Anthony a job at the library, he thinks he'll just be dusting shelves and filing books. Instead, he discovers a hidden clue leading to the treasure of eccentric millionaire Alpheus Winterborn. Miss Eells thinks the clues...

When Dr. Charles Coote-a noted folklorist and old friend of Professor Childermass-returns from a conference in New Orleans, he brings home a small, sinister drum. It's made entirely of black wood with red leather straps and small, white bones. Nobody takes Dr. Coote's worries about the drum very seriously, until Fergie taps it a few times and releases an unspeakable evil. Suddenly, Johnny and Fergie and the professor find themselves battling the imposing...

This magical adventure tells the spine-tingling tale of 10-year-old Lewis, who goes to live with his uncle in a creaky old house with a mysterious tick-tocking heart. But his new town's sleepy façade jolts to life with a secret world of warlocks and witches. Based on the beloved children's classic book.

A young orphan named Lewis Barnavelt aids his magical uncle in locating a clock with the power to bring about the end of the world. Thematic elements including sorcery, some action, scary images, rude humor and language.