Books for adults Bellairs' first published work,
St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies (1966), is a collection of short stories satirizing the rites and rituals of
Second Vatican Council-era
Catholicism. The title story of St. Fidgeta grew out of humorous stories Bellairs made up and shared with friends while living in
Chicago. After committing one such story to paper, he sent it to the Chicago-based Catholic magazine
The Critic, which published the story in summer 1965. The following year, the
hagiography of St. Fidgeta was supplemented by eleven other humorous stories, including an essay on lesser-known
popes of antiquity, a cathedral constructed over the course of centuries, and a spoof letter from a modern-day
Xavier Rynne about the escapades at the fictional Third Vatican Council.
Library Journal hailed
St. Fidgeta as "religious burlesque" that delivered "strokes of inspired foolishness." A writer for the
National Catholic Reporter called it a "gem."
The Pedant and the Shuffly, his second book, is a short illustrated fable featuring the evil magician Snodrog (the titular pedant), who ensnares his victims with inescapable (and nonsensical) logic until the kindly sorcerer, Sir Bertram Crabtree-Gore, enlists the help of a magical Shuffly to defeat Snodrog. The book was originally published in 1968 and rereleased in 2001 and 2009. Bellairs undertook his third book,
The Face in the Frost (1969), while living in Britain and after reading
J.R.R. Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings. Bellairs said of his third book: "
The Face in the Frost was an attempt to write in the Tolkien manner. I was much taken by
The Lord of the Rings and wanted to do a modest work on those lines. In reading the latter book I was struck by the fact that
Gandalf was not much of a person—just a good guy. So I gave Prospero, my wizard, most of my phobias and crotchets. It was simply meant as entertainment and any profundity will have to be read in." Writing in 1973,
Lin Carter described
The Face in the Frost as one of the three best fantasy novels to appear since
The Lord of the Rings. Carter stated that Bellairs was planning a sequel to
The Face in the Frost at the time. An unfinished sequel titled
The Dolphin Cross was included in the anthology
Magic Mirrors (
New England Science Fiction Association Press, 2009). Following the success of
The House with a Clock in Its Walls, Bellairs focused on writing Gothic fantasy adventures aimed at elementary and middle-school children. "I write scary thrillers for kids because I have the imagination of a 10-year-old," remarked Bellairs. "I love haunted houses, ghosts, witches, mummies, incantations, secret rituals performed by the light of the waning moon, coffins, bones, cemeteries and enchanted objects." who are friends and must go on adventures and solve a mystery involving supernatural elements such as ghosts and wicked sorcerers. Beyond these supernatural elements, Bellairs's novels evoked "a child's concern with comfort and security in his
real world," addressing childhood fears of abandonment, loneliness, and bullying, as well as coming of age. Professor
Gary D. Schmidt contended that Bellairs' Lewis Barnavelt and Rose Rita Pottinger trilogy traced the "emerging acceptance of self" by the two main characters, who struggled with internalized
gender norms.
Elizabeth Wein analyzes Bellairs's use of the
haunted house motif in
The House With a Clock in Its Walls. One of the most substantial academic treatments of Bellairs comes from Dawn Heinecken, professor of
women's and gender studies at the
University of Louisville. Heinecken situates Bellairs in 1970s-era anxieties about gender and changing discourses around masculinity, which were reflected in the era's children's literature. English education instructor Randi Dickson suggested that Bellairs' oeuvre evidenced greater literary merit than the works of
R. L. Stine, whose horror fiction appeals to a youthful demographic similar to Bellairs's. Educators have used
The House With the Clock in Its Walls as a case study for using storytelling techniques to draw in reluctant readers and assigned
The Curse of the Blue Figurine to students in a book club. Bellairs' books have been translated into Czech, French, German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, among other languages. ==Illustrators==