Bradbury spends a whole amazing chapter describing Pipkin (“The day Joe Pipkin was born, all the Orange Crush and Nehi soda bottles in the world fizzed over.”) that is almost worth cracking the book’s spine by itself. The book tells the story of eight costumed trick-or-treaters on a Halloween night who discover something direly wrong with one of their friends, a boy of boys by the name of Joe Pipkin.

Let me squeeze that in right here after the token graveyard scene.” But with The Halloween Tree, Bradbury’s treatment of Halloween is more organic, less like he’s writing about an established holiday and more like he’s creating it from scratch, from creeping pumpkin vine and stone-entombed mummy to looming harvest moon and broom-borne witch. Haunted house? Crap, I forgot the haunted house.

When other people write about Halloween, it often seems like they’re just checking off tropes. Or I’m just getting so out of shape that even reading leaves me breathless. It's like he started at sentence one, 'It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state,' and then didn't pause, didn't edit, didn't backtrack, didn’t plot, didn’t waste time on Minesweeper until he finished up at the end with, “At two in the morning, the wind came back for more leaves.” I then imagine him throwing his glowing red pen down with a throbbing hand into a nearby bucket of water with an incredible hiss of steam and sinking back, exhausted, proud, and somewhat uncertain of what just happened. Aside from the content, though, there is something about his writing in this (ostensibly children’s) book that seems, I don’t know.more Bradbury than Bradbury. Sure, part of that is because of my affinity for Halloween. However, subjectively, his 1972 work The Halloween Tree is by far my absolute favorite Bradbury book. That was me wearing my objective hat (it’s soft, colorful, and divides into three limp points, each with a round dangling bell at the end). In my previous post on Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, I stated with minimum equivocation that I believed it to be his greatest work. Well, Halloween has its holy text, too…and it doesn’t guilt you for digging Santa Claus. Octo– You know when you were a kid at Christmas time, and your Sunday school teacher opened the Bible to the book of Luke and said, “This is what Christmas is really all about?” Or maybe it was Linus that told you, I don’t know.

The halloween tree book cover