In the early 1990s, around the time my fellow tweens were getting obsessed with Beverly Hills, 90210 and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I developed my own fixation—just as sweaty, but far more peculiar—on a middle-aged man named John Bellairs.
Bellairs was the author of gothic fantasy books for children, all with formulaic but enticing titles like The [Sinister Characteristic] of the [Spooky Occult Object]; my favorite of these followed the adventures of a bookish, bespectacled 13-year-old named Johnny Dixon—who, along with his best friend, a crotchety retired professor named Roderick Childermass, had a penchant for getting accidentally entangled in plots involving haunted mansions, demonic figurines, or steampunk robots that played baseball and also sometimes did murders. It was all so utterly calibrated to my preadolescent taste that the stories seemed to have been written just for me.
It was in March of 1991—after I had voraciously consumed every Bellairs book in existence and was eagerly awaiting the release of the next—when my mother looked at the newspaper, frowned, and said, “Oh, no.” Then she looked at me, and said, “John Bellairs has died.”
I don’t remember how I responded. Maybe I said, “oh, no,” too, but only because I was 9 and someone else had said it first. But sometime later, as I cracked open The Eyes of the Killer Robot for what would be the first of many rereadings, I realized with sudden and terrible clarity exactly what that death notice truly meant. There would be no more stories, now. Johnny Dixon would never accidentally bring home another cursed antique from the thrift store; Professor Childermass would never again risk a beatdown by heckling the Yankees at Fenway Park. John Bellairs was gone, and with him, an entire world—and everyone in it—that existed only because he had imagined it into being.
The death of an author is a different thing from the loss of a loved one, but what comes after is grief all the same. The bereaved reader experiences despair first, then frustration, then anguished yearning for narrative closure that can never come now that the world built by the storyteller has been plunged into eternal darkness. But then, as always, comes the bargaining stage: What if the story doesn’t have to end? What if it could go on—for a while, or even forever?
