On a trip to Florida with his father, Johnny Dixon visits a fortune-teller and receives an eerie premonition. Inside the crystal ball, Johnny sees a ghost-white face with long white hair and black eyes like puddles of oil, which screams, “The universe shall be mine!” Back home, Johnny’s father falls unconscious, gravely ill in a way the doctors cannot understand. Johnny and his friend Professor Childermass investigate and soon realize that the spirit of Nyarlat-Hotep wants to use Major Dixon’s body to destroy the world. To stop this fearsome demon, Johnny and the professor must join forces with Brewster, an otherworldly falcon, and fight Nyarlat-Hotep in its own, unearthly realm. Can they locate an ancient book and defeat their deepest fears in time, or is Johnny’s father lost and our world doomed forever? Readers will shiver at the multiple worlds of suspense in this twelfth book in the Johnny Dixon series. 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; The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull; and others. His solo 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 one 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.
