It Was a Dark and Silly Night – A Look at John Bellairs’ The Face in the Frost by Bill Ward Whimsy and suspense don’t generally mesh all that well together, for they tend to swing toward opposite poles of reader engagement. Whimsy tickles the intellect, relying on novel juxtapositions and a great deal of textual playfulness – it’s cute, it’s precise, and most often it resides in a place of certainty and safety. Suspense – or more accurately in the case of John Bellairs’ 1969 debut novel The Face in the Frost, dread – is instead the assassin slipping past the intellect to knife that deepest part of the hind-brain, or perhaps its better to say its the cold, rhythmic pounding of subtle waves of suggestion that periodically climax in the massive erosive collapse of the shoreline of a reader’s composure. This horror effect absolutely requires a sort of visceral engagement with the material, a thorough Secondary Belief just like with fantasy – the kind of thing that jokey anachronisms, deliberate wordplay, and humorous allusions would seem to undermine at every turn. But Bellairs manages the trick of juggling these disparate elements with the sure confidence of a natural storyteller in a concise, captivating way that rarely places a foot wrong and never comes close to overstaying its welcome. The Face in the Frost concerns the wizards Prospero – Bellairs cheekily informing us that no, he’s “not the one you were thinking of” — and his best friend Roger Bacon (whom Bellairs, with perhaps yet more cheek, never quite disqualifies from being the Wonderful Doctor himself!)* as they set out on a quest to confront a rival wizard, Melichus. The book begins with Prospero at home: “He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples.” Already in this opening paragraph we see the whimsy seeded with a bit of darkness (the word ‘horror’ itself, though used in a different context, the “shadowy forest”), and it only snowballs in alternating and mutually-reinforcing waves from there. The house’s gutters are carved into “screaming bearded faces” and a riot of zoological carvings decorate the porch, its observatory is topped by an artichoke dome crowned by a...