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 [This book description comes from a different edition of this title. Please report any inaccuracies].
This book is part of a book series called Corgi Science Fiction .
This book has been graded for interest at 9-12 years.
There are 145 pages in this book. This book was published in 2007 by Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers .
Ray Bradbury (22 August 1920 - 5 June 2012) published some 500 short stories, novels, plays and poems since his first story appeared in Weird Tales when he was twenty years old. Among his many famous works are 'Fahrenheit 451,' 'The Illustrated Man,' and 'The Martian Chronicles. '
This book contains the following story:
The Halloween Tree
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.
