The Halloween Tree

Bradbury, Ray D

ISBN 10: 0812419367 ISBN 13: 9780812419368

Publisher: Turtleback Books, 1999

Synopsis

" A fast-moving, eerie...tale set on Halloween night. Eight costumed boys running to meet their friend Pipkin at the haunted house outside town encounter instead the huge and cadaverous Mr. Moundshroud. As Pipkin scrambles to join them, he is swept away by a dark Something, and Moundshroud leads the boys on the tail of a kite through time and space to search the past for their friend and the meaning of Halloween. After witnessing a funeral procession in ancient Egypt, cavemen discovering fire, Druid rites, the persecution of witches in the Dark Ages, and the gargoyles of Notre Dame, they catch up with the elusive Pipkin in the catacombs of Mexico, where each boy gives one year from the end of his life to save Pipkin's. Enhanced by appropriately haunting black-and-white drawings." --Booklist

About this title

Review:

Somewhere inside Ray Bradbury's head is a place where it's always golden autumn, in 1920s midwest America, and every night is Halloween. He has a gift for evoking childhood thrills where joy and terror come heart-stoppingly close. Here eight kids dressed as horrors for Halloween go hunting darkness and find it:

... one hundred million tons of night all crammed in that huge dark pit, that dank cellar, that deliciously frightening ravine.

Awaiting them is the comic-sinister trickster Moundshroud, who whirls the boys on a tour through time that shows them the roots of Halloween--cavemen trembling from the dark, Egyptians whose lives revolved around death, Druids appeasing their terrible gods, and so on to the grim carnival of Mexico's Day of the Dead. It's full of poetic flashes, as when "all the old beasts, all the old tales, all the old nightmares, all the unused demons-put- by" are summoned from every corner of Europe to become gargoyles in the newly-built Notre Dame Cathedral.

Bradbury's theme of celebrating life by celebrating death is underlined by fleeting appearances of the gang's missing ninth boy, the one we soon realise is gravely ill and may not last the night. But Moundshroud, who is more than he seems, offers a deal ... The Halloween Tree is written as though for children, with lashings of exclamation marks--but, just as in a fairground, adults too can let their hair down and enjoy the wild roller- coaster ride. --David Langford

Review:

"If you want to know what Halloween is, or if you simply want an eerie adventure, take this mystery-history trip. You couldn't have a better guide than Ray Bradbury."--Boston Globe

" If you want to know what Halloween is, or if you simply want an eerie adventure, take this mystery-history trip. You couldn't have a better guide than Ray Bradbury." --Boston Globe

About this edition

• Publisher: Turtleback Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0812419367
• ISBN 13: 9780812419368
• Binding: Library Binding
• Number of pages: 145
• Illustrator: Mugnaini Joseph