The Greentown series, Book 2 Ray Bradbury William Morrow (HarperCollins) Fiction, MG? Fantasy/Horror Themes: Classics, Country Tales, Demons, Sideshows ****
Description
In the graying October of a younger America, two small-town boys - Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade - are thrilled when they catch wind of a carnival coming to
Greentown. Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark promise all manner of thrills and amusements, from the mystifying Mirror Maze to the horrifying collection of circus freaks.
But from the night of the carnival's eerie arrival, darkness and shadows spread across the town. Will and Jim find the bonds of their friendship tested to the utmost
as they face temptations and terrors that have bested Mankind since the dawn of human awareness.
Review
The Disney movie based on this book has long been a Halloween staple for me, but I'd never gotten around to reading it until now. Even though Bradbury wrote the
screenplay for the movie, there are distinct differences. His prose runs thick with metaphors, giving the story's many dark images and moments of terror a nightmarish,
semi-lucid quality. Through it all, a decent story and solid characters unfold. I found the writing a bit thick at times, making for slow reading, and memories of the
movie lingered long past the point when the stories diverged, but overall it was a memorable book. I still think I liked the movie's version of events a little better,
though.
Incidentally, though this is technically Book 2 in a series centered around Bradbury's fictional Greentown, it can be read as a standalone.
(I'm also not entirely certain on the age classification - in some ways, it's more of a grown-up book, childhood as viewed through a lens of nostalgia - but I know of
people who read it as children, and I can see a certain kind of older child, one more aware and literate perhaps than some peers, appreciating it.)
In a small Midwestern town on Halloween, Tom Skelton and his friends can hardly wait to race into the autumn night, full of costumes and candy and spooks and
shadows... but their best friend, Pipkin, hasn't joined them, asking instead that they meet him at the old house in the ravine past town. Here, the eight boys find
a great, towering tree full of lit pumpkins: a real Halloween tree. And with it, they find the mysterious black-robed figure Mr. Moundshroud, who takes them on a
wind-wild flight through history, down to the roots of all the fears and rituals that have become today's Halloween - all the while chasing a phantom of Pipkin,
a soul dreadfully close to its final departure from Earth...
Review
With Bradbury's signature near-poetic prose and Grimly's borderline-surreal grayscale illustrations, The Halloween Tree is a holiday classic, an ode to the
timeless spirit of boyhood as much as a celebration of Halloween. It's a story of wonder and of terror, stretching from ancient caves and Egyptian tombs to modern
Mexican celebrations of the Day of the Dead. The story isn't so much a coherent arc with driving characters as it is a series of events they experience, a gauntlet
of time and fear building up to a choice on which Pipkin's life ultimately depends, a choice to either cower from the ageless fear of Death or confront it. Some
kids would likely be put off by Bradbury's prose, which can get a bit convoluted even to grown-ups, and others might find the subject matter unsettling, but it's
much truer to the spirit of the holiday than so many modern interpretations, those bubble-wrapped cutesy commercial "specials" that file down the fangs of what
is supposed to be a subtly unsettling night. Though the driftings of the boys almost grew tedious at times, and I could almost swear Bradbury was recycling a few
turns of phrase and images from previous works, I still give it a solid Good rating.
A traveler between towns chances upon a stranger covered in odd tattoos that seem almost alive. The Illustrated Man claims that the
images were given to him by an old woman from the far future, and that they are more curse than blessing, for all that they fascinate
the traveler. Before bedding down for the evening, the Illustrated Man warns his companion against staring too long - particularly at
one blank section in his back. Yet the traveler cannot help himself. In those shifting, dancing lines of ink, he sees eighteen tales
unfold: tales of the past, the present, and the future, of invaders from Mars and lost spacemen on Venus, of time traveling refugees
and a children's game gone terribly wrong, and more... all inevitably leading toward the revelation in that final, forbidden image.
Review
Ray Bradbury remains one of the true grandmaster wordsmiths, not just in science fiction but general storytelling. This classic
collection holds up fairly well for the most part, painting vivid pictures in the mind's eye. He even foresaw the dangers of letting
technology raise the next generation in "The Veldt", the tale of a family living in a "smart home" with a mechanical intelligence that
does everything, even create and think, for the children. Still, several of his stories can't help but show their age in certain ideas
of the future, particularly cultural assumptions about women's roles (or lack thereof) and a reliance on Christian imagery
(particularly in "The Man", where an ambitious captain and his crew, out to exploit new planets, arrive at one rustic backwater to
discover that another offworlder has just been and left after performing a series of miracles for the natives - a man who is never
named but is clearly intended to be Jesus). One sad relic of his time was his idea that the book burners and censors would come from
the halls of pure science and reason, striving to drive out "obsolete" imagination and superstition (and with it the creativity and
wonder that truly makes humanity human); in our time, we can see that it's superstition that's determined to drive out science and
reason as well as imagination. Bradbury's tendency toward downer endings, either slow-motion tragedies or dark final twists of fate,
can also be a bit much after several such stories in a row. (My late father referred to Bradbury's works as "anti-science fiction" as
he saw the genre as being more about the promise of science and the future, not the dark sides and the inevitable endings of great
things, which Bradbury so often explored.) As for the Illustrated Man himself, whose stories bookend the collection, he remains an
iconic figure in that gray area between sci-fi, magic realism, and horror. The stories are still worth reading, and still have plenty
to say.
A Martian woman's strange dreams provoke a strong reaction from her husband... An expedition to Mars inexplicably finds a small town from the 1950's American Midwest
waiting at the landing site... A man has a strange encounter on a lonely road one long Martian night... An automated house patiently awaits the return of its masters...
The story of humanity's exploration and conquest of Mars unfolds in this classic series of short stories and vignettes by noted sci-fi author Ray Bradbury.
Review
I've read a couple short stories from this classic collection over the years, but never the entire volume, so I figured it was worth a try when I found the eBook
version at a discount. Bradbury's work pushes into poetry, riddled with ethereal descriptions of both ordinary and extraordinary things. Though characters rarely
return, the whole collection works as a narrative, as well as an examination of two civilizations doomed by their own inescapable flaws. The Martians, already in
their twilight, refuse to accept what the coming of Earth-men means until it's too late, while the young hot-blooded humans, fleeing their own collapsing planet,
fail to realize that the seeds of their own self-destruction are within them all along. Moments of wonder and otherworldly beauty punctuate a slow-motion tragedy,
with glimmers of hope all too often quashed by Martian denial and human ignorance. It's more allegory than hard science, a space-age mythos, in which the future Earth
consists of hermetically-sealed 1950's white Midwestern American people, values, and lifestyles, and Mars is an especially exotic New World for Human Progress to
destroy, plunder, and exploit. Men are independent scientists and explorers and doers, while women are needy and emotional tag-alongs. One wonders how much of this was
a deliberate conceit on the part of Bradbury and how much was a result of cultural blinders of the era in which he wrote, the assumption that cultural norms (not to
mention American dominance of space travel) would remain intact through interplanetary colonization. I have to admit some of those assumptions irked me - but such was
the era in which Bradbury wrote these tales, and they weren't meant to be strict, hard SF speculation anyway, but more a mirror to explore and expose our own flaws -
not to mention the likely outcome if those flaws remain unexamined and unchecked. On the whole, despite some elements of aging around the edges as the mid-century
America he waxes poetic upon fades ever further into history, this collection becomes more than the mere sum of its stand-alone parts, still well worthy of its classic
status.
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