The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost

John Bellairs (1938-1991) was 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.

Brad Strickland was born in New Holland, Georgia, in 1947 and has written over seventy-five books in the intervening years. He is also a professor of English at the University of Georgia in Gainsville, about six miles from where he was born. He and his wife, Barbara, have two grown children, both of whom have artistic careers of their own. Their nest is not empty, however, as they have three cats and two dogs, which is enough to keep them busy.

Working in every genre, Johnny Heller has narrated over seven hundred audiobooks. He is a 2005 and 2009 Audie Award winner, a double nominee in 2015, a 2014 nominee for Best Male Narrator, a double nominee in 2012 and was named a Best Voice of 2008-2011, 2014, 2015 and a Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award Winner 2008-2013. A winner of over twenty-five AudioFile Earphones Awards, AudioFile magazine named Heller one of the top fifty voices of the twentieth century. Johnny coaches actors in audiobook narration and commercial voice-over locally, nationally and internationally.