From the award-winning author of The Face in the Frost comes the story of three brothers who rescue a talking gargoyle from their neighborhood junkyard
Michael, David, and Alphonsus Jr. (aka Fonsy) are spending the summer trying to blow up the town dock and playing marathon Monopoly games. On the brink of death-by-boredom, they head to the local dump in search of treasures—such as oil cans that Michael can use to build a submarine. But what they find is far from garbage.
Staring out at them, between two black stovepipes, is the head of a grinning stone gargoyle with shifty eyes and a long snout. He demands that the brothers take him home to live with them, so the boys wrap him in blankets and cart him back in a wagon. At the house, the gargoyle regales them with vivid tales of his exploits in faraway times and places. He even comes up with endlessly inventive ways of terrorizing the boys’ irritatingly dull neighbors. Finally, this is a summer worth writing home about.
The Gargoyle in the Dump is a recently discovered, never-before-published story. Also included are two pages of the author’s original typed manuscript and an introduction from his long-time literary agent, Richard Curtis.
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; and The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. His stand-alone 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 a dozen novels before his untimely death in 1991.
