The Halloween Tree

The Halloween Tree began as a screenplay for an animated film that was never made, and it shows Bradbury's gift for spectacle at its most exuberant. Eight boys, racing through Halloween night to find their friend Pipkin who has been snatched away by something ancient and terrible, are led by the mysterious Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud on a journey through four thousand years of human history.

They visit the Egypt of the pharaohs, where death was something to be prepared for and celebrated. They move through the Greece of Samhain, through the Roman Lemuria, through the gargoyles of a medieval cathedral. Each stop teaches them something about why humans dress as the dead one night a year, why we have always needed to look at the darkness and grin.

Bradbury said he wanted to write a book that would give children the history of Halloween, not the candy version but the fire and the dark, the ancient human need to acknowledge death and then dance around it. He succeeded. The book ends with one of the most moving acts of collective sacrifice in all his fiction.