Audiobook Review: The House with a Clock in Its Walls

The House with a Clock in Its Walls

by John Bellairs

Unabridged Audiobook (4 hrs 33 min)
Narrated by George Guidall

(1973/2018)

This was an audiobook I bought (cheap) because I was intrigued by the title. I had never heard of the author before. When I look him up now, I find that he was an American author (1938-1991) who wrote quite a few ”gothic mystery novels for young adults”.

This one was written in 1973. Lewis, an orphan after his parents died in a car crash, comes to live with his Uncle Jonathan, whom he has never met before. He soon learns that Jonathan is a magician, and his next-door neighbor and friend, Mrs. Zimmermann, is also a witch. As the book title indicates, the story also involves a mystery clock, hidden somewhere within the walls of Jonathan's house, which was previously owned by an evil wizard.

While the book starts out as a rather innocent encounter with magic illusions, it grows a lot darker when Lewis seeks to impress a boy from school by trying to resurrect an anonymous dead person in the local cemetery at Halloween. This only succeeds ”sort of”, but with dire consequences... (Think gothic ghost story!)

Some review of the book that I read before I bought it introduced it as ”Before Harry Potter, there was Lewis Barnavelt”. Yes, there are a number of obvious (and classic) common ingredients, like an orphan child hero with certain flaws, weird old house, magic that runs in the family, ghosts and graveyards, good vs evil, one or more objects that must be found and destroyed to save the world etc. (I'd not be surprised to find it among Rowling's sources of inspiration.) But compared to the Potter world, the setting in this book is very narrow, with only a handful of important characters, and mostly make-it-up-as-you-go-along kind of magic – but also mixed with some dark stuff, which at Hogwarts would have been kept in the restricted section of the library. On the whole I found the story ”uneven”. 

There was a film based on the book made as late as in 2018. This seems to have got mixed reviews as well – ranging from entertaining to too scary (for a family movie) to plain boring. (And that's pretty much how I felt about the book, too...)