Illustrated in black-and-white. Now back in print is the stunning
contemporary classic by American literary treasure Ray Bradbury, author of
"Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles." Meet the mysterious
Mr. Moonshroud, who leads eight boys on a journey back through the centuries to
discover the real meaning of Halloween. Prose of exquisite beauty will send
shivers of delight--and terror--through readers, who will want to take this
trip over and over again, long after the last jack-o'-lantern has gone dark.
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
