The Dark Secret of Weatherend

John Bellairs's The Dark Secret of Weatherend is a creepy summer mystery for 9 year olds about a boy and an elderly librarian poking about somewhere they've been told not to go.

What happens

Anthony Monday is fourteen, skinny, and wears a red leather cap in all weathers. He's cycling three miles through rural Minnesota in August heat to visit his best friend. The year, the book tells us, is 1954.

His best friend is Miss Eells. She's sixty-eight, small and birdlike with a wild nest of white hair, and she's Hoosac's head librarian, except that just now she isn't. She called the head of the Library Board a stupid, pompous busybody, out loud, and got packed off to a branch library where three people a day come in. When Anthony arrives she's out on the back lawn taking it out on the grass with a nine iron.

That friendship is the best thing in the book. They play chess. They play Scrabble. She tells him exactly what she thinks and he tells her his secrets, and neither of them talks down to the other for a second.

She suggests a drive and an ice cream. Then she pulls over at a hill instead, because what she actually wanted to show him is Weatherend.

It's a deserted Gothic mansion with boarded windows and pinnacles on the roof, and below it an overgrown garden with two headless sphinxes, broken statues and mossy benches tipped over. There are also two large No Trespassing signs on the fence, which Miss Eells treats as roughly an invitation (she's torn one down and trampled on it before now). She changes into her tennis shoes and climbs over.

The padlock on the old garage springs open in her hand. Inside, at the back, in the dark, are four large shapes.

The creep is slow and there isn't a drop of blood in it. The unease comes from a boarded-up house and an old diary. Anthony is quietly afraid of dogs too, since one chased him and he broke his arm running away, and the book takes that seriously rather than making a joke of it.

Two things to flag. Anthony is fourteen, well above the shelf age here, though the writing is aimed squarely at younger readers and there's nothing in it a nine year old shouldn't meet. And it's a spooky book about a man who wanted to freeze the world, so a reader who takes an atmosphere home may want this one in daylight.

What to read next

If that suits, have a look at The Dollhouse. Another child stranded for a summer in a huge cold house belonging to a difficult old woman, with something in the attic that keeps changing when she isn't looking. Fair warning that it opens on her parents' marriage falling apart.