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To the limit and beyond: The Twelfth Mile by E.G. Perrault

Posted in 1970s, Century of Books - 2018, Perrault, E.G., Read in 2018, tagged 1972 novel, Century of Books - 2018, Perrault, E.G., The Twelfth Mile on October 1, 2018| 2 Comments »

The Twelfth Mile by E.G. Perrault ~ 1972. This edition: Doubleday, 1972. Hardcover. 256 pages.

Look what showed up in the just-past summer’s book pile.

Well, I have to admit I hadn’t exactly forgotten about it, as it was definitely a memorable read, albeit in the “so compellingly baddish you can’t look away” category.

Seems like Vancouver writer E.G. Perrault threw everything he had at this one. A number of great ideas for disaster scenarios are stacked up high, with the result that the sheer improbability of it all leads to a certain sort of morbid humour through sheer overexposure to multiple horrible things happening.

Here’s the premise.

A Canadian tugboat captain, experiencing marital woes, decides to avoid fighting with his wife by taking on a contract to haul an American oil drilling rig working just inside the Canadian twelve mile limit into safer waters to avoid an impending hurricane. Little do we know that Mother Nature (and Mother Russia) are preparing some nasty surprises for Captain Westholme and his crew.

From the back dust jacket of my first edition copy:

Christy Westholme only took the assignment to get away from his wife to think things over. It was an absolutely routine job. Take Haida Noble out of Vancouver a few miles to the big off-shore drilling rig and tow it back into port. Nothing to it, compared with some of the other towing jobs he and Haida Noble had done all over the Pacific .

Then the hurricane struck, then the tidal wave. Somehow Haida Noble survived; battered but still afloat, butting its way through mountainous seas toward the oil rig. But the rig had disappeared – in its place was a liferaft containing three Americans, one of them dead. And nearby was a strange crippled ship in imminent danger of being swept onto the rocky shore,

In the nick of time Westholme got a line aboard the strange ship and began to tow it into the nearest port. A routine salvage tow. But then he discovered that this was a Russian ship whose captain had orders not to be captured at any cost – even if the cost involved defying the Canadian Navy and Air Force, and a U.S. battleship, and taking the world to the brink of war.

Did you catch all that? It understates things.

Let me sum up our disasters:

#1 – industrial sabotage of a British-American drill rig by the Russians (fifty workers dead!)
#2 – hurricane
#3 – massive tidal wave wiping out communities from California to Alaska (hundreds, maybe thousands of civilians dead!)
#4 – hostile takeover of our hero’s tugboat by Russian spy ship (more dead people!)
#5 – eventual destruction of spy ship including self-immolation of quite likeable Russian captain and his dedicated ship’s doctor, the luscious Dr. Larissa Lebedovitch
#6 – international crisis triggered by Russian presence in Canadian waters bringing World War III ever closer

I think those are the “high” points.

What a depressing story. Death and destruction galore. Luckily the characters are so flat that we really can’t believe in them in any meaningful way, so when they fall by the wayside it’s really not that emotionally involving.

At least Captain Westholme and his wife get back together at the end, swearing to be nicer to each other in future. With so many people dead all around them and dozens of coastal communities in ruins, isn’t it nice that our hero and his newly adoring wife are bound for domestic bliss? Ha.

Rating this wanna-be Hammond Innes-style action-disaster novel is tough. I did read it through to the end, albeit with frequent strong urges to chuck it across the room in its stupider moments. Oh, and it was sexist, too. Though I let that pass because of the era-expectedness of the he-man commentary regarding the few, mostly offstage female characters – those whiny wives back home and the buxom female Russian sailors.

My husband tried to read this book and bailed out partway through, saying that even the unintended humour of unlikely disaster after unlikely disaster wasn’t worth the energy needed to slog through the novel’s head-hurting blend of stodgy writing and dramatic hyperbole.

Obviously my family is not the target audience for this novel, though it appears that it appealed to enough readers to cause it to go into multiple editions and several international translations.

I’ll have to give The Twelfth Mile a point for its local flavour, as it were. British Columbia coastal landmarks were well referenced throughout, adding a certain degree of interest, though post-fictional-tsunami a bunch of them were basically wiped off the map. A couple of points also for the sheer bravado of E.G. Perrault for putting forward such an over-the-top collection of overlapping dramatic episodes.

My rating: 3/10

A bit more on the author, because I feel bad about slamming this ambitious work so hard, when the writer was so obviously well-meaning.

He sounds like he was a really nice guy, and it’s probably unfair to judge him so harshly on the strength of this one novel, which means I’ll likely be keeping an eye out for his other titles as I go about my travels.

E.G. (Ernest George) Perrault was born in Penticton, B.C. and attended the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1948. According to an old UBC Alumni magazine, Perrault was one of the first students to attend one of Earle Birney’s creative writing classes.

Perrault had some success as a newspaper reporter, short story and screenplay writer. He also wrote several non-fiction books about B.C. industry and personalities. Three action/disaster novels show up bearing his name: The Kingdom Carver (1968, lumber barons in turn of the century BC : “He set out to conquer a fierce frontier… She, to tame a strong man’s angry heart”), The Twelfth Mile (1972), and Spoil! (1976, what looks like an oil derrick disaster).

Here is E.G. Perrault’s rather poignant obituary, lovingly written by his daughter Michelle at her father’s death in 2010.

I was interested to note that Perrault did indeed have firsthand knowledge of life at sea, serving on a submarine during World War II. And yes, the strongest sections of The Twelfth Mile were those involving the mechanics of operating a tugboat, and the storm sequences.

His story began Feb. 9, 1922, the oldest of four children. His father, Ernest Perrault, succumbed to tuberculosis in 1935, leaving his wife Flossie with nothing but a small pension and a strong determination to make her children the best they could be.

Ernie always advised and abided by the saying “follow your bliss.” For him, this meant writing. His first short story was published in the Vancouver Sun before he was 12, when he won a children’s writing contest.

This achievement sparked a career that spanned more than 70 years, leaving his family and fans a legacy of books, plays, documentaries, short stories, radio plays, musicals and poetry that will be treasured forever. His most recent book, Tong: The Story of Tong Louie, Vancouver’s Quiet Titan, was published in 2002 and won the BC Book Prizes Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Ernie continued to write, and recently had been working on a collection of short stories.

At 18, Ernie joined the Air Force and was stationed in Yarmouth, N.S., where, as a member of 160 Squadron, he was a navigator assigned to submarine patrol off the Atlantic coast.

Ernie used his veteran’s grant to go to the University of British Columbia, where he became president of the Radio Society and wrote for the campus newsletter. He earned a double degree in English and sociology, graduating in 1948. Together with his brother Ray, Ernie received the Great Trekker Award in 1987, bestowed upon UBC alumni who have distinguished themselves in their field.

Ernie found a way to connect with everyone he met. He could carry on equally fascinating conversations with academics, business leaders, toddlers or teenagers. While he was a man of the written word, above all, Ernie was a good listener. He drew people out, helping them to appreciate and share their own unique stories.

As a city boy, Ernie had little exposure to the outdoors until a local charity gave him the opportunity to go to camp when he was 13. This experience changed his life and instilled in him a deep appreciation for nature and the wonders of the outdoors. He camped, fished, hiked and hunted. He loved sharing these experiences, especially with his four children – Lisa, Larry, Michelle and Steve – and six grandchildren, who, along with countless others, attribute catching their first fish to Ernie’s patient guidance.

Like one of his awesome campfire stories, Ernie has left us wanting more.

Michelle Perrault is Ernie’s daughter.

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Rescuing the Local Pagans from Christianity: Harold Horwood’s White Eskimo

Posted in 1970s, Canadian Book Challenge #8, Horwood, Harold, Read in 2015, tagged 1972 novel, Canadian Book Challenge 8, Horwood, Harold, White Eskimo on June 28, 2015| 6 Comments »

White Eskimo by Harold Horwood ~ 1972. This edition: Doubleday, 1972. Hardcover. ISBN: 0-385-04346-0. 228 pages.

My rating: 4/10

Oh, gosh, here’s another one.

A candidate for Canada’s stupidest novel, that is. (see The Last Canadian for the reference.)

I wanted to give credit to the author for his strong points: an interesting set-up framing the telling of the tale (eight people travelling in a supply ship along the northern Labrador coast start reminiscing abut the titular character), his strong descriptive passages regarding the natural features of the setting – land, sea, various wild creatures, his keen social conscience (many of his allegations regarding the damage inflicted upon indigenous peoples by paternalistic Caucasian interlopers are bang-on), and his obvious passion for his fictional subject.

But it is that very passion which goes too far by expecting the reader to swallow whole some bizarre allegations, which the author goes on about at great length with ever increasing vehemence.

To whit:

All religious and medical missionaries are weak, evil, power-hungry, greedy effetes, motivated in their travels to the furthest reaches of the Arctic lands by an unquenchable thirst for controlling every thought and action of their native congregations. (European Protestants being the most evil; the Catholics get a conditional pass.)
All Eskimos (Inuit to us now; this was written in 1972) are beautifully childlike and trusting in nature, prepared by their innate belief in magic to follow anyone who presents well. They can be given some responsibilities, but because of their simplistic thought processes are apt to lose focus and wander off-task. Some very highly advanced individuals may be trusted with supervisory roles, but these are the exception.
All Eskimo women make excellent wives/bed partners, being by nature compliant and soft-spoken. They are sexually eager and ready to accommodate any man who wishes to make use of their bodies, which is handy, because they are (in this tale) shared about among the men as a matter of course.
The old Eskimo ways are the best. Period. Oh, except that it is okay to use European-introduced guns, steel traps and other various innovations versus traditional hunting tools. (But we won’t go there, because that would be inconsistent with the premise that The Old Ways are The Best.)
Returning to traditional ways (though of course with aforementioned guns, steel traps etc.) means a return to a utopian way of existence.
But because of his beautifully childlike and innocent nature, the Eskimo must be led in this direction (the return to utopia) by a designated leader, in this case a Great Hunter, an über-Eskimo (or would that be a pseudo-Eskimo, because he’s actually a white guy?) who is admirable because of his superior size, strength, hunting abilities, and undoubted “magical” powers.
Oh – almost forgot this one – all policemen are corrupt. They can however denounce their corruption by leaving the police force and rehabilitating themselves in another occupation.
Ditto most government officials. Except for the exceptions.

Here’s the story.

In a remote Labrador outpost, a stranger suddenly appears:

He descended upon Labrador as though from heaven. The Eskimos still talk of the morning the giant stranger came down out of the hills in the dead of winter dressed in the skin of a white bear, driving a team of white dogs with a long sled on the Eskimo pattern – a komatik as we call it – and bringing the biggest single load of white fox pelts anyone had ever seen.

The big white stranger (for he is indeed Caucasian under all those furs) proceeds to make friends with the local fur trader (an intellectual atheist) and enemies with the local missionary (a soft, luxury-loving German Protestant) and devotees of the entire local Eskimo population (due to his obviously magical powers, what with his coming from the spirit-infested interior mountains where hunters do not go etcetera etcetera).

Within days he has become “song brother” with the most prominent of the local Eskimos, and has started learning to speak the language with wonderful fluency. No surprises there, for Gillingham, the “White Eskimo”, is a dab hand at everything he attempts.

Pleased by his reception, Gillingham comes up with a clever idea. The Eskimos now gathered at the missionary post must return to the wilds, casting off the white man’s religious and societal constraints. Under his leadership, they will set up a series of traplines in an area shunned by all since the death of its previous inhabitants in a flu epidemic. Gillingham’s “magic” will keep the bad spirits away.

The Eskimos agreeably play along, and all goes well.

For a while.

Back at the settlement, the villainous Mr. Kosh (the missionary) is frothing with rage at the loss of the main core of his congregation. He swears vengeance upon Gillingham, and calls in the provincial police on a trumped up complaint against Gillingham: incitement of the Eskimos to pagan rituals and human sacrifice! The police arrive in full riot gear, and for a while things are tense, until the fur trader (Gillingham’s new pal and soon-to-be partner in the fur dealing enterprise) points out that no one is actually missing, so the human sacrifice thing was an exaggeration. (Mr. Kosh obviously mistook people comatose from their excessive revels for dead men.)

But soon there is a dead man, as Gillingham’s song brother is found under suspicious circumstance with a neat bullet hole in the centre of his forehead. There are no witnesses to the murder, but Mr. Kosh calls in the police again, swearing that Gillingham must be the murderer, for he is the only one capable of such an accurate shot. (In a community of skilled hunters, no one else is able to accurately hit a target at close range? Really, Mr. Horwood and fictional Mr. Kosh? Really?!)

The Eskimos all say, “Oh, no, couldn’t be Gillingham! A man does not kill his song brother, because he himself would then die!” The police, under Kosh’s influence, arrest Gillingham anyway. No one else is suggested as the murderer, and there is no attempt at investigation.

Long story short: the murder charge is dismissed on a technicality, and Gillingham serves several months in a southern prison on a lesser charge.

After getting out of jail and working his way around the world doing various menial jobs, Gillingham returns to Labrador, makes the rounds of his Eskimo protégés, gets his Eskimo wife pregnant, and then sets off alone into the mysterious mountainous interior from whence he came, leaving behind his own legend and a bunch of newly motivated Eskimo chaps, who go on to fulfill the White Eskimo’s legacy by succeeding at everything they put their hands to.

We never do find out who the murderer is.

What a stupid story this turned out to be, Farley Mowat’s glowing blurb on the front cover to the contrary. (“The best novel to come out of Canada in generations.”)

Turns out upon further investigation that Mowat and fellow author Horwood were buddies. Enough said.

Harold Horwood was quite the guy. He was politically active in Newfoundland politics, and represented Labrador as an MLA for a term. He travelled widely in the north, and became, as years went on, a passionate critic of what he saw as governmental abuses of power, especially in the support given to the religious orders in their administration of Eskimo affairs, and the complicity of the provincial police and RCMP in upholding that administration.

Horwood wrote a number of well received books, including a fictionalized 1966 memoir – Tomorrow Will be Sunday – also strongly critical of organized religion.

Here’s the Kirkus review for Sunday:

Embedded in excellent, chilly description of Newfoundland village life is a tangled sex story that is convincing at every turn but somewhat overplotted as a whole. In spite of honest characterizations, a story with as many twists as this begins to beg the reader’s already willingly given sympathies. Caplin Bight is populated by 250 brethren of the Church of the Firstborn. Hell-fearing, mean-spirited and paleolithic, these Stone Age Christian fisher folk expect the Day of Wrath imminently. They propagate only while fully clothed in bed in the dark of night. One day their pastor seduces fifteen year old Eli Pallisher. Eli’s closest friend and mentor is a young schoolteacher, engaged to the town’s only freethinking girl. Eli and his friend are discovered by the pastor, innocently wrestling in the nude after a swim. Charges are lodged and the schoolteacher goes to jail. While he is serving his sentence, Eli falls in love with the fiancee and she becomes pregnant. The friend is more open-minded than the town and returns finally to win his girl back…. Horwood keenly renders the vicious brutalization of the townsfolk by their religious mores; the rigors of cod and salmon fishing; and the benighted narrowness of a community such as this.

I seem to sense a sameness of theme with White Eskimo, though Tomorrow Will be Sunday‘s characters come from a bit farther south.

White Eskimo was undeniably an interesting read, but, sadly, I feel that I can’t recommend it, as its strengths were outweighed by the ridiculous plot, and the oversimplified depictions of the characters (all missionaries are bad, all Eskimos are good and noble, if slightly stupid). There’s also an attempt to portray the hero as a modern Gilgamesh, but it doesn’t come off very convincingly.

I’m open to exploring more of Horwood’s writing, but I will be approaching with caution versus enthusiasm.

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Ray Bradbury’s Halloween Tree: A large dose of nostalgia and maybe something more

Posted in 1970s, Bradbury, Ray, Read in 2013, tagged 1972 novel, Bradbury, Ray, The Halloween Tree on October 31, 2013| 8 Comments »

The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury ~ 1972. This edition: Knopf, 1972. Illustrated by Joseph Mugnaini. Hardcover. ISBN: 0-394-92409-6. 145 pages.

My rating: 6.5/10

Blink your eyes and a year has passed by. Weren’t we just here, on All Hallow’s Eve? And here we are again…

Last night I went out to the car and brought in the bags of Hallowe’en candy stashed in the trunk. Many years of experience have taught me the folly of allowing it into the house too early, and numerous times I have had to buy it twice. For once it is in, all bets are off, and unless I can package it up into bags intended for neighbourhood trick-or-treaters immediately, the odds are high that some wee child will get shortchanged of his or her full share of sugar.

We live at the end of a sparsely populated rural road, and no one ever makes it this far, so part of our Hallowe’en tradition since moving here twenty-some years ago has been to take our contribution to a neighbour’s place mid-way along the traditional route. For Hallowe’en in the country is a bit different than in town. No walking is involved (though one legendary year a few intrepid teens did go on horseback) – the distances are too great. Our usual route was a 15 miles round trip, with 12 houses visited, and those houses would strive to outdo each other in creativity and quantity of goodies for the “neighbour kids” who knocked on the door.

Homemade popcorn balls, full size bags of chips, cans of pop, store-bought candy by the bagful, pickles (yes, pickles – “witch’s fingers”, don’t you know?!), and pomegranate halves (“Because they just look so weird”) and just-roasted pumpkin seeds – what a glorious haul! At each house a prolonged visit, as the costumed ones are made to sing for their treats, spun around to examine their get-ups, photographed and congratulated on their creativity and sent on their way. It’s a very big deal around here, where everybody knows everybody, and usually can predict to the exact number how many children will be showing up – a phenomenal 18 (!) last year. Until our own kids passed that elusive milestone (mid-teenish) when the dress-up thrill began to pale, it was one of our family’s favourite nights of the year.

This year, after a few seasons of non-observance of the night, the now-independently-mobile (driver’s licences and a car) teens are talking of going into town to take part in a “zombie walk”, and costume makings are all over the kitchen table, so I guess they’re not too old for it after all, though the whole concept of the zombie thing leaves their parents a bit bemused. We will be joining up for a bonfire and fireworks once it gets dark, hosted by some of our in-town relations, so it promises to be an pleasurable evening.

All of this digression out of the way, I will now turn to the original purpose of this post, which is to talk a little bit about a book. Twizzlers and Rockets and a few mini Mars Bars at hand, I’m ready to go. Let’s see what my sugar-fueled morning brain can come up with to say about the book I searched out last night as an appropriate Hallowe’en read.

It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn’t so much wilderness around you couldn’t see the town. But on the other hand there wasn’t so much town you couldn’t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness. The town was full of trees. And dry grass and dead flowers now that autumn was here. And full of fences to walk on and sidewalks to skate on and a large ravine to tumble in and yell across. And the town was full of…

Boys.
And it was the afternoon of Halloween.
And all the houses shut against a cool wind.
And the town was full of cold sunlight.
But suddenly, the day was gone.
Night came out from under each tree and spread.

Behind the doors of all the houses there was a scurry of mouse feet, muted cries, flickerings of light.

Behind one door, Tom Skelton, aged thirteen, stopped and listened.

The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats.

Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows’ Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked.

Tom Skelton is ready to take part in this night of nights. Playing on his fortunate last name, he’s decked himself out in bones, white stitched on black, and he’s keen to get going, as are his friends.

Wham. Eight front doors banged shut.

Eight boys made a series of beautiful leaps over flowerpots, rails, dead ferns, bushes, landing on their own dry-starched front lawns. Galloping, rushing, they seized a final sheet, adjusted a last mask, tugged at strange mushroom capos or wigs, shouting at the way the wind took them along, helped their running; glad of the wind, or cursing boy curses as masks fell off or hung sideways or stuffed up their noses with a muslin smell like a dog’s hot breath…

But wait! Shouldn’t there be nine of them? Who is missing?

One is not there, and as they run to the missing Pipkin’s house an awful foreboding forms in each boyish heart. What could be wrong?

Pipkin appears, pale and sad, moving like an old man. Not feeling well at all. But still keen to join in. “You go ahead. I’ll catch you up.”

Agreeing to rendezvous in the ravine, at the House of the Haunts (brrr!) the boys scatter into the night.

And when they get there, still no Pipkin.

…They stood at last by a crumbling wall, looking up and up and still farther up at the great tombyard top of the old house. For that’s what it seemed. The high mountain peak of the mansion was littered with what looked like black bones or iron rods, and enough chimneys to choke out smoke signals from three dozen fires on sooty hearths hidden far below in dim bowels of this monster place. With so many chimneys, the roof seemed a vast cemetery, each chimney signifying the burial place of some old god of fire or enchantress of steam, smoke, and firefly spark. Even as they watched, a kind of bleak exhalation of soot breathed up out of some four dozen flues, darkening the sky still more, and putting out some few stars.

And towering over the house, an amazing, stupendous, fabulous tree.

And it was such a tree as they had never seen in all their lives.

It stood in the middle of a vast yard behind the terribly strange house. And this tree rose up some hundred feet in the air, taller than the high roofs and full and round and well branched, and covered all over with rich assortments of red and brown and yellow autumn leaves. [And] the Tree was hung with a variety of pumpkins of every shape and size and a number of tints and hues of smoky yellow or bright orange.

“A pumpkin tree,” someone said.

“No,” said Tom.

The wind blew among the high branches and tossed their bright burdens, softly.

“A Halloween Tree,” said Tom.

And he was right.

And out of a pile of leaves below the tree arises a huge man in dark clothes, a menacing and laughing man, intoning something about “tricks Tricks TRICKS,” and before they know it the eight boys are being whisked off on a fantastical journey into the past, to glimpse the origins of Halloween, and to try to pin down the elusive Pipkin, who seem always to be just a little beyond them, a faint and ghostly presence.

I have to admit that right here, page 33, is where Ray Bradbury rather lost me. I completely bought into the nostalgic Halloween night magic of the house and the tree and the boys and the thrills of their adolescent nocturnal glories, but once their shape-shifting, darkly mysterious host materialized and whisked them off into a time travel journey, the magic thinned and the bones of the Teachable Moment shone through.

For this is a journey back to learn about the origins of Halloween, and the boys first build a kite out of a barn’s wall worth of tattered circus posters which carries them out into the night sky and beyond. The author is grandly creative in this bit, and admittedly throughout; the strength of the book is definitely in the imagery, if not in the highly contrived plot.

Off they all go to visit ancient Egypt, when the pyramids were new, and then to glimpse Night of the Souls rites in Greece and Rome. They have a seriously creepy encounter with scythe-wielding Samhain in Druidic times, watch the Romans fall the sacred groves, and the Roman golden images turn into Christian icons. A witch’s gathering attended by flying broomstick is next, merging into a visit to Notre Dame Cathedral and its fantastical gargoyles, one of which appears to be the missing Pipkin, turned to stone. Nice bit here with the wind and the rain allowing the stone creatures to speak.

Finally to the Day of the Dead in Mexico, into the graveyards and down into the Catacombs, where the eight boys are given a chance to finally save their elusive friend, but at a potentially terrible cost. Needless to say, they do the expected thing, and find themselves whisked back home, where they learn that Pipkin has indeed had a brush with death (appendicitis) but has had an operation, and has rallied wonderfully well.

Midnight strikes. All return to their homes, and the night turns quiet as the candle blames wink out on the Halloween Tree.

That felt really rushed. A whirlwind tour with too many stops.

I have mixed emotions about this short novel, this juvenile fable, this ode to youth and to the magic of an idealized Halloween.

Bradbury returns to his personal childhood world of white-picket-fence, small-town, mid-West America; his characters are those perennially adolescent boys just on the verge of the thing that comes next. Their world is ultimately clean, decent, safe and secure; the dark places are there, but there is always a refuge, and the light always triumphs in the end. Fair enough, but one can’t help but feel a bit uneasy, that there’s something missing from the scene, or maybe that there’s something more going on than we get to see. Where are the dark places in your world, dear reader, and what place of safety have you to look forward to?

Exactly.

The time travel bits are a bit too handy, a bit too contrived, a bit too screenplay-ready. Aha! And there’s the twist. This story was first conceived as just that, a screenplay for an animated movie, in 1969. That project fell through, and Bradbury dusted it off and turned it into this narrative work a few years later. This explains a lot, the abrupt switching from scene to scene, and the rushed and hyper-active speed of travel throughout. It would make a good movie, and in 1993 Bradbury helped Hanna-Barbera bring the story to the screen, winning an Emmy Award in 1994 for the project. ( I haven’t seen the 1993 film, but I am mildly curious about it now.)

An evocative juvenile novel, with interest for the adult reader in the beautifully written descriptive passages found throughout, if one can wade through the “Gee whiz!” kidspeak and the absolutely dire rhyming bits scattered throughout. (Poetry obviously is not one of Bradbury’s strengths, at least not here.) I’m not quite sure how present day youth would view this one; I suspect the dreamily imaginative ones would find much to like, but it also has a very vintage feel, perhaps too much so to appeal to the majority.

So there it is: a Halloween book review on the day itself.

Cheers, all.

Oh, and the morning candy was most tasty, but I think I’m good now for another year! 😉

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