By donating a box full of strange objects, Professor Childermass gets his young friend Johnny Dixon a summer job at the Gudge Museum. Everything seems okay as Johnny mops the floors and dusts the artifacts. That is, until a sinister man named Mattheus Mergal shows up looking for the one item the professor held back to keep safe-a wooden hand carved by the evil wizard Esdrias Blackleash. If Mergal gets the hand, he'll be able to bring back his long-dead relative and their sinister powers will be unstoppable. It's up to Johnny and the professor to keep Mergal from taking over the world, but they'll have to face nightmares, snakes, and imprisonment inside a tiny snow globe. Can they stop Mattheus Mergal in time? In this tenth book in the Johnny Dixon series, author Brad Strickland continues the fast-paced adventures and eerie atmosphere first created by master of chills John Bellairs. 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; The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull; and others. His solo 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 one dozen novels before his untimely death in 1991. Brad Strickland has written and cowritten forty-one novels, many of them for younger readers. He is the author of the fantasy trilogy Moon Dreams, Nul's Quest, and Wizard's Mole, and the creator of the popular horror novel Shadowshow. With his wife, Barbara, he has written for the Star Trek Young Adult book series, for Nickelodeon's Are You Afraid of the Dark? book series, and for Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (Pocket Books). Both solo and with Thomas E. Fuller, he has written several books about Wishbone, public TV's literature-loving dog. When he's not writing, he teaches English at Gainesville College in Gainesville, Georgia. He and Barbara have two children, Amy and Jonathan, and a daughter-in-law, Rebecca. They live and work in Oakwood, Georgia.