The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder

One dark, drippy day, when Byron “Fergie” Ferguson gets bored, he wonders what the last book in the library is. What he finds past the last set of shelves is a battered black cover with the Dewey decimal number 99.99S and a title as red as blood—The Book of True Wishes by Jarmyn Thanatos.

Even though Fergie is a good kid, he steals the book, setting off a chain of sinister events that threaten not only his life but the lives of his friends Johnny Dixon and Professor Childermass as well. Soon, Fergie is under the control of Thanatos, a mad sorcerer who has been putting children under his spell for the past three hundred years. Can Johnny and the professor break Fergie’s deepening trance in time to stop Thanatos and his dangerous march toward maniacal immortality?

This eleventh book in the Johnny Dixon series will hold readers spellbound until the final page.

John Bellairs is beloved as a master of Gothic young adult novels and fantasies. His series about the adventures of Lewis Barnavelt and his uncle Jonathan, which includes The House with a Clock in Its Walls, is a classic. He also wrote a series of novels featuring the character Johnny Dixon. Among the titles in that series are The Curse of the Blue Figurine; The Mummy, The Will,   and The Crypt; The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull; and others. His solo novel The Face in the Frost is also regarded as a fantasy classic, and among his earlier works are St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies and The Pedant and the Shuffly. Bellairs was a prolific writer, publishing more than one dozen novels before his untimely death in 1991. Brad Strickland has written and cowritten forty-one novels, many of them for younger readers. He is the author of the fantasy trilogy Moon Dreams, Nul’s Quest, and Wizard’s Mole, and the creator of the popular horror novel Shadowshow. With his wife, Barbara, he has written for the Star Trek Young Adult book series, for Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? book series, and for Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (Pocket Books). Both solo and with Thomas E. Fuller, he has written several books about Wishbone, public TV’s literature-loving dog. When he's not writing, he teaches English at Gainesville College in Gainesville, Georgia. He and Barbara have two children, Amy and Jonathan, and a daughter-in-law, Rebecca. They live and work in Oakwood, Georgia.