145 pages
Reviewed by Rae C.
It's Halloween night and the "best boy who ever lived", Pipkin, is sick and can't come trick or treating. The neighborhood gang has to go on without him, but not before Pipkin points them to the haunted house with the Halloween Tree. The boys go, and there they meet the mysterious (and annoying) Moundshroud, who takes them on a trip through the ages and around the world to discover (Bradbury's version of) the roots of Halloween. And to save their friend Pipkin, who is in awful danger. The book has a somewhat happy ending, but not before the manipulative Moundshroud gets his pound of flesh.
I read this book when I was in my early teens, but among the great Sci Fi writers, Bradbury always disappoints me. There are no girls in the group, the writing is indulgent and very masculine, and the story is too thin and Bradbury's research is superficial. There is NO god named "Samhain"! Pure literary fantasy.
(Whenever someone mentions Samhain as a deity, I know it is from this book alone. Samhain is the greatest Feast day of the Celtic Druids, their New Year, and based on the position of the Pleiadaes. At the time the Catholic Church appropriated the holiday, it probably did fall on Halloween, but not anymore. It's generally around the 5th of November these days. Samhain is a time when the veil between the worlds is thin, and the dead come back to visit. The Druids divided the year in half, and the flip side of Samhain is Bealtaine, when the veil is again thin- but this time with the spirits of fertility and new life. The 1960's movie The Wicker Man is an exploitation of Beltaine that is inaccurate like the Halloween Tree, but much more satisfying.)
If an editor had been a little more rigorous about the indulgent prose, and Bradbury had been more thorough in his research and made the plot work with history instead of changing history to fit his plot, I might have liked it more. At least as an adult. As a kid I never cared much for books where there were no girls at all. And I hated Moundshroud's trickery. I felt like I'd been robbed at the end.
Read it if you want to see the Dickens influence (Pipkin, the Marley knocker, the story itself), and to see how this influenced Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas (mostly the illustrations of Moundshroud). Or maybe you will like it. Many men I know consider this a Halloween classic that has to be read every year.
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