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1-Page Summary of Lock In
Overall Summary
The House with a Clock in its Walls is a young adult fantasy novel about Lewis Barnavelt, an orphan who goes to live with his uncle. His uncle is not very good at magic, but he has friends who are much better than him. He finds himself caught up in the middle of stopping two evil wizards from coming back from the dead and destroying the known world.
When Lewis’s parents are killed in a car accident, he is sent to live with his uncle, Jonathon Barnavelt. He soon discovers that his uncle is a warlock; after moving into the house with him, Lewis learns that magic exists and there are good and evil witches. The neighbor of Jonathon Barnavelt is an evil witch named Florence Zimmermann; she has powers much greater than those of his uncle.
As soon as he arrives, Lewis is pulled into a mystery. There’s an old house where Jonathon lives that has a strange ticking sound. It’s like the sound of an enormous clock but no one can find it or turn it off. The ticking sometimes slows down and speeds up, but there’s never any indication of what it means or where it comes from—Jonathon suspects that Isaac and Selenna Izard were sorcerers who did evil magic in the house before they moved out.
Lewis, however, is not concerned about his uncle’s problem. He has enrolled in a new school and meets someone who admires him, Tarby. Lewis does everything he can to keep Tarby interested in him so that he will spend more time with him.
As the days go by, Tarby’s interest in Lewis fades. He drifts away from their friendship and focuses on other things. This devastates Lewis, who doesn’t understand why he is unappealing to his friend. To keep Tarby around, Lewis promises that he can raise a spirit from the dead. The boys go to the graveyard at night and choose Selenna Izard’s grave because of its proximity to them. However, it turns out that this trick didn’t work as well as they thought it would have; Tarby writes off the trick and leaves Lewis devastated about what to do with this newly-raised spirit he created accidentally.
Lewis soon finds out that his new neighbor is actually Selenna in disguise, and that the clock in the walls is part of a grand plot to end the world. He was originally supposed to be killed by Selenna and Isaac years ago, but he escaped because they couldn’t find him. The book ends with Lewis settling into his new life and making a friend who loves canons.
John Bellairs is an American author famous for his gothic mystery series. The series follows Lewis and Jonathon Barnavelt on their magical adventures. There are twelve books in the series, written from 1973 to 2008. The last book is called “The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer.” It was adapted into a feature film in 2018, starring Jack Black as Uncle Jonathan.
