The Hand of the Necromancer (Johnny Dixon) - Hardcover

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; and The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. His stand-alone 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 a 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.

Grade 5-8?Thirteen-year-old Johnny Dixon is back in this new adventure written by Strickland in the manner of John Bellairs. It's summer in the 1950s, and Johnny, as always, is living in Duston Heights, MA. He is able to get a job at the Gudge Museum with the help of his friend, Professor Childermass, and the professor's donation of a collection of bizarre artifacts made by the evil wizard Esdrias Blackleash during the time of the Salem witch trials. When Mattheus Mergal shows up from Boston looking to steal the collection's wooden hand, the story's pace speeds up, suspense escalates, and the supernatural fun begins. Complete with a haunted house, nightmares, wild storms, snakes, near-death by lightning, and even Johnny's imprisonment in a small, decorative snow globe, the story of Mergal's intent to raise his dead ancestor, the self-styled Emperor of the World, is stylistically a treat as well, full of foreshadowing and figurative language. Just as Duston Heights attracts eerie people like magnets, so will young pre-Stephen King fans be attracted to this spellbinding tale.?Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME
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