The little Catholic touches are nice, especially for those of us who can remember our parochial school days, but overall it's a silly story with a few too many plot holes and a resolution that reads like it was written on the fly. I doubt I would have enjoyed it any more had I been 9 years old. ( )

Johnny Dixon enjoys listening to his favorite scary radio program , The House of Mystery. He likes reading about ancient Egypt and the terrible curses of the pharaohs' toms. But he never actually believes in evil spirits - until the day he was nooping around the town church basement and found an old blue figurine with a message scrawled inside: Whoever removes these thing from the church, does so at his own peril...

There seems to be a template for this author: boy becomes unwitting pawn of supernatural force, but is rescued in the nick of time and overcomes the evil. The appeal for me to today is the locations and the period; in the 70s Bellairs wrote books set in the 50s, most likely in the time of his own adolescence. The locations are also enjoyable, because I am familiar with them. ( )

Fun read, remarkably suspenseful. ( )

Hmmm. I honestly don't know what I think of this book. I nearly quit, out of sheer boredom - not with the story, but with the language and sentence structure. It's really, really basic and simplistic. The story is interesting, both in itself and in the world it depicts, but the characters are sketchy stereotypes, there's several instances of telling ("Johnny felt happy.") instead of showing, and the book is an illustration of the thing I never really believed in from writing classes, where they tell you to vary the length and patterns of your sentences or it gets dull. If this is an early book by Bellairs, maybe he gets better, so I'll try a few more. I also never felt scared, though I dislike horror stories; the setup is a little too obvious, and (again) the language is too simplistic, to draw me in and make me _feel_ the events. OK, my opinion is - not particularly good but it's worth trying some others in the series. Definitely a read-once, though. ( )