THE EYES OF THE KILLER ROBOT

"Johnny gasped in terror—the man had no eyes. Streaks of blood ran down from empty black sockets. 'They took my eyes,' the man moaned." Johnny Dixon and his friends Fergie and Professor Childermass return in a shivery but contrived adventure involving magic, madness, vengeance and sundry felonies. Some 50 years ago, one Evaristus Sloane had built a robot powered by a spell that required human eyes; now he and his evil wife have constructed another, and fixed on Johnny as the intended organ donor. Quick pacing, plus a thick frosting of standard scary ingredients—forebodings, apparitions, anonymous harassment, a supposedly-empty house, secret rooms and secretive villagers, etc.—make this story palatable, but a very heavy dose of coincidence keeps it from being very nourishing. As usual, Bellairs leads his readers through a twisty plot, but the twists are disappointingly convenient and predictable.