Book Review: The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury
Eight boys are out in costume tonight, looking for Halloween fun. Skeleton, witch, ape-man and so many more. Eight boys, but it should be nine. Where is Pipkin, merriest of the lot? He is taken, vanished into the darkness. What can be done? They must search for him, through time and space, with the aid of Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud. And along the way, discover the true meaning of Halloween!
This 1972 children’s fantasy shows off Ray Bradbury’s lyrical prose (verging on poetry) and the illustrations of Joseph Mugnaini, and the Yearling cover by Leo and Diane Dillon is pretty good too.
The plot, what there is of it, is a whirlwind tour of past times and foreign places, presided over by Moundshroud, one of the jolliest stand-ins for Death I’ve ever read. He’s clearly having a ball making kites and urging the boys forward on their mad dash to save Pipkin.
Pipkin is the boys’ boy, kind of like a benevolent version of Peter Pan. In his absence, the de facto leader of the boys is Tom Skelton, who is wearing a skeleton costume because, well, wouldn’t you? The other young fellows are kind of interchangeable, managing one or two scenes of relevance each.
Bradbury does an excellent job of tying the theme together, and there’s some imagery here you won’t soon forget.
The book does tie very much into Bradbury’s nostalgia for his own boyhood, and is very much a boy-oriented story. Twenty-first Century kids might have a harder time relating to such a one-gender tale. (The cartoon adaptation, narrated by Ray Bradbury himself, changes the child wearing a witch costume to a girl to reflect a more modern sensibility.)
Despite the spooky trappings, this is fantasy rather than horror, at least until the end, where the children face a dark choice they may not fully understand.
Suitable for fourth-graders and up, and a bit younger as a bedtime story read with an adult. Also recommended to grown-ups with nostalgia for the Halloweens of their youth.
Here’s the opening to the animated version:
