2018 read #4: The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs.

The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs
153 pages
Published 1969
Read from January 29 to February 1
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

What I loved about this book was its wonderful atmosphere, which mingled creeping, half-seen, corner-of-your eye horror with charmingly fussy details and an almost children's-book whimsicality. It's a balance that anticipated Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or, perhaps, the Fairyland books by Catherynne M. Valente. I won't say it's ahead of its time, exactly; one can well imagine it being a contemporary of A Wizard of Earthsea or Lord of Light. But as a work of fantastic fiction, it certainly feels more polished and aesthetically-purposeful than most novels published in the ensuing decade. Or heck, most fantasy novels published to this day.

What I didn't like so much about this book was how the characters themselves seem to have wandered out of a children's fantasy novel. John Bellairs apparently spent most of his career writing young adult works, and while The Face in the Frost is considered "for adults," everything about its central duo, from their names (Prospero and Roger Bacon) to the way they caper about and throw snowballs makes them seem like middle school friends or brothers who are detectives, rather than top-tier wizards who are getting on in years. At one point, Prospero, in mortal peril, having been pursued across half a kingdom by faceless terrors and separated from Roger Bacon, finds himself in a village where nothing feels right, where mirrors seem just a bit off, where the people in the pub keep having the same conversation, and his only response is to shrug and make nothing of it. The scene's payoff is satisfyingly creepy, but if the only way to make it work is to have a cunning wizard overlooking clues that even my D&D players would have picked up on, it just isn't worth it. Frost shows its age in the creaky joints of its storytelling.