mr_squiddle

Well, I'll fix that. Sorta. Kinda.

I aten't dead.

Sometimes I post to furcom, but GMail is stupidly designed and provides no indication as to whether my messages have silently bounced or were just boring.

Behold! a book about a ten-year-old whose parents died in a car crash entering a world of magic and contending for about the space of two pages with a villain who's spent about ten years being not-quite-dead.
No, it's not Harry Potter; it's not really all that close, either, but dollars to donuts Jo Rowling threw it in her hopper at some point. It's THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS by John Bellairs, now in the process of becoming a major motion picture¹, a book that was a big hit with the half-his-present-size Mr Squirrel. It's also one of the books that people put onto the list of "What to read after Harry Potter".
How is it from the perspective of the full-size nut-nosher? Not too bad; although its defects, mainly of the "details out of left field that should have been back-seeded during the editorial-advice stage", are more obvious, and clearly Mr Squirrel's younger self was making full exercise of his imagination — there's ephemerally less to it now, curse the Suck Fairy; and like the first HP book, it's rather perfunctory in the actual plot department — it is also the case that some of its literary facets are more exposed now, or at least exposable, and quite a lot of them there are, too: Bellairs had a brain full of English Lit and wasn't afraid to use it, which is why although, like most of the other books on the post-Potter reading list, it's lacking in the sheer stuffitude that HP has, it's less lacking than most², especially in consideration of its relatively low page count³. It would be nice to see the author's original draft, which was targeted at an adult-age audience, exhumed and published.
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¹ Unfortunately not one starring Tabitha St Germain and Seth Rogen⁴, and directed by Guillermo del Toro, but Mr Squirrel remains cautiously optimistic. It does have Kyle MacLachlan! In a role that technically should have no lines, true, but...er...
² Only Pamela Dean's TAM LIN sits between this and HP in Mr Squirrel's mind.
³ 176.
⁴ No, really — take a look at him in STEVE JOBS.