3 comments

1. I’ve never read the Halloween Tree, but it sounds like vintage Bradbury; he was a master of writing children’s stories for adults.

   Farenheit 451 – and possibly Something Wicked This Way Comes – are the famous ones, of course, but I have a well thumbed collection of his short stories. R is for Rocket, The Strawberry Window, Uncle Einar and, of course, The Time Machine.

2. Hiya @Bluesqueakpip – yes, there are so many Bradbury classics.  I’m surprised to hear you haven’t read this particular one, but that’s just me being solipsistic about my reading habits.  🙂

   I snuck this blog out there about a month early, since due to its subject matter it’s really more of an October read.  I heard talk of Halloween on @JimTheFish‘s blog between him and @PhaseShift, though, and they reminded me that it was time once again to dust down my All Hallow’s Eve reading material.

   I can’t remember how old I was when I first read The Halloween Tree, but I must have been 7 or 8 years old, and found it fascinating to learn of so many cultures’ traditions of mourning their dead, and marking the dying of summer which turns into winter.  [Not least because I grew up in Los Angeles where there really isn’t such a marked change between the seasons.] It was only as I continued re-reading it each year that I gleaned so much more from the story, from Bradbury’s writing style, and from contemplation of death – and what it really meant for Pipkin’s friends to each give up a year of their lives for him.

   It’s interesting how many different things you can see in a text simply by reading it at different points in your life.  Because I re-read The Halloween Tree each year, I perhaps don’t see such great changes in my perception year-on-year.  But here’s where Doctor Who gets dragged back kicking and screaming into my thesis – re-watching old episodes at vastly different points in one’s life affords one a completely different viewpoint on the story, the characters, the overall point of each episode – all due to one’s own different perspective on life when re-viewing. And all that having been said … one still remembers one’s feelings when first reading / watching, and that colours our adult perceptions when re-visiting the ‘same old’ story.

   I know that Moundshroud was terrifying to me as a child; I see that character completely differently now, but behind my adult reading eyes, I still feel that same childlike terror at what he seems to be capable of …

3. @shazzbot

   I caught this before heading out at the start of the week but, like @bluesqueakpip, I’ve never read the book myself. In fact, I think the first I heard about it was a showing of the animated film with Leonard Nimoy (and I guess that would have been late 90s/early 00s).

   After chatting to people in a couple of my usual second hand book shops, I suspect it may have had limited push in the UK because, when published in the 70s we had very little of the culture the start of the story is based on. Dressing up, trick or treating, etc was really unusual. From a youthful perspective from that time, it was a minor event really overshadowed by Bonfire Night on 5th November, where we children could get down to the serious business of handling illicit explosives and erecting fire brigade troubling bonfires on any spare waste ground near us. 😉 I just thought I’d let you know that relative lack of response might be a bit of a cultural gap from the period.

   Thanks for the write up though, and I do intend to seek it out.