THE STONE, THE CIPHER, AND THE SHADOWS

The cast of John Bellairs’ classic Johnny Dixon series is resurrected for a creepy new story with contemporary elements.

Strickland’s tale is set in the mid-1950s—with telephones on cords, black-and-white TVs, doctors making house calls, and other period details—but in the midst of a more timely feeling flu pandemic and general shutdown. Johnny, with friends Sarah Channing and Fergie Ferguson plus, of course, crusty Professor Childermass, faces a sorcerer seeking power over a shadow realm as well as eerie manifestations ranging from glimpses of spectral figures and a horribly distorted face in the window to a midday spell of townwide darkness. The members of the all-White cast, from methodical Johnny and competent Sarah on, remain true to type, and Bellairs fans will also find the way the author slows the pacing with references to the professor’s culinary treats, what everyone is wearing or eating, conversations about this epidemic and the one in 1918, and like minor details to be quaintly reminiscent of the original series. Still, along with ciphered messages to decode, old legends of a local woman who could foretell events, characters with secrets, and nighttime expeditions to a Colonial-era graveyard, the author tucks in increasingly macabre visions and incidents on the way to a climactic supernatural struggle over a certain grave and a suitably spooky fate for the villain.

The buildup is leisurely by current standards, but the cast and plot offer a seamless fit into the classic series.