Instead a mysterious man shows an takes them on a journey through history, starting with ancient Egypt at the time of the construction of the pyramids, from there he takes them to the Celts, to medieval Paris, the Europe of the witch hunts and finally Mexico on the Día des los muertos. even as they watched, a kind of bleak exhalation of soot breathed up out of some four dozen flues, darkening the sky still more, and putting out some few stars. With so many chimneys, the roof seemed a vast cemetery, each chimney signifying the burial place of some old god of fire or enchantress of steam, smoke, and firefly spark. The high mountain peak of the mansion was littered with what looked like black bones or iron rods, and enough chimneys to choke out smoke signals from three dozen fires on sooty hearths hidden far below in dim bowels of this monster place. Until they stood at last by a crumbling wall, looking up and up and still farther up at the great tombyard top of the old house. One of their friends, Pipkin, isn’t ready yet and tells them to go and wait for him, outside of the town, near a well-known haunted house. On the night of Halloween eight boys in costumes gather to go trick-or-treating. The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats. Night came out from under each tree and spread. And the town was full of cold sunlight.īut suddenly, the day was gone. And all the houses shut against a cool wind.

I re-read so many of the sentences, I suppose I already read the whole book twice. It is full of passages and sentences like theseĪnd it was the afternoon of Halloween. The first thing that struck me was how original and descriptive his writing is. The Halloween Tree has been on my TBR pile for a long time and it’s almost the end of October it seemed like a good final choice for R.I.P. If this hadn’t happened I might not have felt like picking one of his novels right now. I hadn’t been thinking of Bradbury that much until I read that he has died this year. There were only two of the major novels I haven’t read, one of which is Fahrenheit 451 (yes, I know, a huge omission) and the other one The Halloween Tree. The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man. When I was a teenager I devoured almost all of his books. It’s been such a long time since I’ve read my last Ray Bradbury novel.

But when Something whisks their friend Pip away, only one man, the sinister Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud, can help the boys find him. ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT, eight trick-or-treaters gather at the haunted house by the edge of town, ready for adventure.

The halloween tree novel