The Halloween Tree: Previously Unpublished Author's Preferred Text
Ray Bradbury, edited by Jon Eller, compiled and designed by Donn Albright
Gauntlet (496p)
$75. ISBN: 1-887368-80-9
(October 2005)
Expensive volumes exploring the work of modern writers are, at worst, exercises
in triviality published to milk money from devoted fans; at best, they reveal
something of the creative process, bits of publishing business, and an
occasional kernel of insight into the work itself. But Gauntlet's Halloween
treat is something else altogether: an impressive archeological expedition by
editor Jon Eller into several permutations of a near-classic creation by a
writer who has become a legend during his own lifetime. Reproduction of
Bradbury's own art is integral; drawings by Joe Mugnaini enhance. The evolution
begins in 1959 with a few pages of a never-completed short story that is reborn
when a negative reaction to television's "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie
Brown!" results in a 1967-68 screenplay intended for an MGM animation that never
came to be, but led to a "juvenile fiction" for Knopf. The editor and publisher
insisted on keeping the novella within the 1972 bounds of the juvenile genre and
the author's version restores such dark deletions as a barn "canopied with lust,
pasted over with animal murder poster on poster..." and a "most strange
smile...with a leer of death and twist of dry-rot and a lurk of funeral-candle
illumination shadowing its lips." The Halloween Tree became a radio play in 1980
and, coming full circle, an animated teleplay in 1993. Since the study is made
possible due to typescripts, carbon copies, printed galleys, and hard copy
correspondence, the appreciative reader cannot help but wonder if -- in this
digital age of word processing, PDFs, and email -- such illuminating scrutiny is
still possible. -- (from Fantasy #1)