Horror Series read as kid

Hi,
I'm looking for a series of horror books I read as a kid. They have black and white covers. I remember only bits and pieces of the names of the characters. I do remember that often the main character was named "Johnny" and a "Professor Childress" (I believe). They often dealt with demons and things of that nature. The cover of one of them was a drawing of a boy looking at a mask on a street at night.
Another book by the author was about a girl that went back in time (I believe) and she was also a recurring character.
Most of the antagonists were demons.

I know this isn't much, but I hope someone knows the titles/author name.
Thanks!

You are thinking of the books by John Bellairs.

His most famous book was The House With a Clock in Its Walls, which was the first in a series. The third book The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring stars Rose, who was a secondary character in the previous books.

He has another series (starting with The Curse of the Blue Figurine) which stars Johnny Dixon and Professor Roderick Childermass.

I find it vastly amusing that someone would consider Bellairs to be "horror." I would have placed him solidly into fantasy territory.

Really? I consider his stories to be horror. Horror doesn't always have to be chest-bursting and splatter. The Bellairs books do have a spooky air about them.

Oh I agree that they're spooky. I guess that I've just had a mental image based on typical advertised "horror" films or halloween haunted houses as being typical of horror books as well (of which there are plenty), or that the horrible bits are the focus of the books. I think in Bellairs' case, the spooky parts are more atmospheric than anything else. In a similar way, I suppose that the classics Dracula and Frankenstein would also be horror, but I personally would never think to classify them that way.

Just a weird realization about my own mental categories being peculiar!

5: How about gothic?

>6 infiniteletters: - That's much closer to what I think of, exactly!

Goosebumps and Saw III (or whatever they're up to now) are horror, Bellairs and some of Andre Norton's "Magic" books - Octagon Magic, Steel Magic, etc. Those are quite different to me, and gothic is a pretty close label for their haunted/creepy but not gory nature.

I see what you mean, but think that is too limiting on what horror is. As a fan of all sorts of things spooky, I don't like to see the field limited to Saw 3 or Goosebumps. Those have their place, but so do Bellairs and movies like The Others...

I would say "horror" is any story primarily designed to scare people.

And I dunno about you, but I never cared either way about slasher films, and yet I *still* can't sleep in any room with an unidentified ticking noise.

> 9 - I can agree with that.

Also, please don't think I mean to disparage anyone else's categorizing - it was just a bit of a shock to realize that I'd never even considered thinking of Bellair's work as horror, and that many (perhaps even most) other people would think of it that way right off.

Just strange how things work sometimes in our brains.

On a related note, a fellow librarian told me today that one of the "Genreflecting" type books (big compilations of titles and summaries for specific genres that libraries use often for purchasing titles) had listed the Twilight series under horror. Now that one WAS a head-scratcher!

Yeah...the one that left me saying 'Huh?' was when John Ringo's Ghost won a major romance award. It's a typical men's adventure, mostly (deeper thought, but still) - lots of guns and sex. Romance?????

>10 RowanTribe: Vampire = Horror

...at least to some people, these days others may think Vampire = Romance : )