Description:

John Bellairs, the name in Gothic mysteries for middle graders, wrote terrifying tales full of adventure, attitude, and alarm. For years, young readers have crept, crawled, and gone bump in the night with the unlikely heroes of these Gothic novels: Lewis Barnavelt, Johnny Dixon, and Anthony Monday. Now, the ten top-selling titles feature an updated cover look. Loyal fans and enticed newcomers will love the series even more with this haunting new look!

From Publishers Weekly

Working as a library assistant in a sleepy town, Anthony Monday is having quite a different summer than he expected. While on vacation with his elderly friends Mrs. and Miss Eells the young man has discovered a passage into another dimension; the three are transported to an underworld by way of a magic chest. When they learn of a plot by the evil inhabitants to absorb humanity into their world, Anthony and his friends get a lot more excitement than they bargained for. Hampered by characters that do little but react predictably to their circumstances, the story must rely on its plot and concept for interest. While the notion of passage into another world is not new, the late Bellairs ( The Trolley to Yesterday ; The Secret of the Underground Room ) provides unique twists, as the characters must discover the keys to entry after their original passage is destroyed. Some readers will be caught up in the idea of inter-dimensional travel but others will feel, as these characters do, that they're just along for the ride and may not involve themselves along the way. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Grade 5-8-- Anthony and his klutzy librarian friend, Miss Eells, plan to spend an uneventful summer with her brother Emerson in an isolated old cottage in Canada. Events quickly take a sinister turn when Anthony finds a mysterious old chest that turns out to be a doorway into a parallel world in which a mad group of beings are plotting the destruction of Earth. The key to their success is a magical object, the Logos cube. Unfortunately for the Autarchs, a former member of their society has realized their evil ways and hidden the cube. Anthony, Miss Eells, and Emerson experience a series of harrowing adventures as they explore the strange world of the Autarchs and search for the object so that they can save the Earth. The atmosphere throughout this adventuresome chiller is appropriately scary and the villains are certainly evil personified, but there are several loose ends. Readers never know why the Autarchs have so much interest in the Earth or why they want to destroy it. Their world is certainly a terrifying place, but its origins and purposes are never made clear. This story will attract Bellairs's fans, but it is not likely to win many new ones. --Bruce Anne Shook, Mendenhall Middle School, Greensboro, NC
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.