FOR SALE: A Piece of LisaBug's Soul...

...interesting trades considered.

I love finding old children’s books with inscriptions in them.

Knowing that someone bought this book—this EXACT COPY—to give to a youngster, hoping it would enrich their life, somehow makes the book more desirable to me than some random copy that maybe nobody ever loved. Who knows, the giver may have even passed down the treasured tome from their own personal library!

"Brett from Colleen Jeffrey Annette Jeremy '78"
Things You've Always Wanted To Know About Monsters But Were Afraid To Ask!, Tony Tallerico, 1978.

But happening upon these personalized books is also kind of sad, considering the gift has since been abandoned to the shelves of an uncaring thrift store.

It's downright bittersweet when the inscription is dated. The giver presumed the book would be held onto long enough to have forgotten exactly WHEN it was received, so recorded this very important date for posterity, right there on the page for the recipient's eternally grateful old eyes to behold.

"To Tony Ferro from Brian Bonic Oct. 1, 1979"
Horror Tales: Spirits, Spells & The Unknown, Roger Elwood, 1974.

Why do I find a book inscribed from one stranger to another so appealing?

If I still believed in the paranormal, I might theorize that an object absorbs positive emotional energy from its owner, energy that can be transferred to other people once they assume possession of the article.

I'm reminded of a circa-1980's SNL skit about an unusual pawnbroker that prices items based on their sentimental value... (full transcript)

"The other day I had a lady come in, and she dropped off all her kid's drawings! They're selling like hotcakes!"
Or this moment from The Simpsons (S12E3, Insane Clown Poppy) when Krusty the Clown, in the midst of a high-stakes poker game with Fat Tony, calls the bet with his daughter’s worthless, yet priceless, violin.

"Well, it won't bring much cash, but its sentimental value is through the roof!"
Looked at spiritually, a gifted book contains a little bit of both the giver's and the recipient's soul.

Following that line of thought into a darker place: I just acquired a piece of your soul! It's mine now, and you'll never get it back...

"To Amber Love U.Drew & A.Synette May, 1990"
Whales, Jane Watson and Rod Ruth, 1978.

Of course I'm not the first to envision books as vessels of a person's energy or essence.

Ray Bradbury probably wasn't the first either, but in the film adaptation of his Something Wicked This Way Comes, Mr. Dark steals years from the life of Charles Halloway by tearing at one of Halloway's books. Each torn page deducts a year from his lifespan and aggravates the painful pounding of his heart.

On that note, here's a recent second-hand find, a beautifully preserved copy of Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful (1961). This is a book that was well taken care of and, other than a few cracks in the dust jacket, looks as fresh today as it must have when it was originally purchased.

It was a Christmas present to Lisa, or "LisaBug", as her parents affectionately called her, and is inscribed thusly:

To: LisaBug
Hope this gives yuh the spooks!
Love from
Mom + Dad
Merry Christmas Hon
December 1969

But there's more. Sitting right next to it on the same shelf was this copy of Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery (1962), also pristine.

It's another present, given two Christmases later. Lisa is no longer "LisaBug", perhaps having outgrown the pet name.

Merry Christmas Lisa - December 1971
Hope you like this one too!
Love from Mother + Dad

Perhaps she had also, by this time, outgrown books of this kind -- her parents oblivious to their maturing daughter's changing tastes? All we know for sure is, many Christmases later, both books ended up sitting on the shelf of a used book store, orphaned.

Much of this blog is the celebration of "stuff" that contributed something to my youth and seemed somehow, years later, important. But despite the name in the banner, most of these things were not sitting carefully stored in the a closet all these years like cherished treasures.

In fact, many were lost in the folly of youth, only to be reacquired years later after their absence gnawed at me for reasons irrational. A jigsaw puzzle, an activity book, finger puppets, a record, a comic. I've probably clocked hundreds of hours haunting thrift stores and auction web sites chasing this junk.

What drives me to pursue these things? The fleeting pleasure of shallow nostalgia? A vague attempt to reconstruct some lost aspect of myself? Am I writing my autobiography in artifacts?

And more importantly, does it ever end?

Is there one final item, perhaps unknown even to me until I've stumbled upon it... a missing keystone that finishes the quest forever?

In "Adrift off the Islets of Langerhans" (1974, Harlan Ellison, from the book Deathbird Stories) the intersection of childhood ephemera and eternity is explored in the person of one Larry Talbot, who commissions, from otherworldly cartographers, a map detailing the geographic coordinates of the eternal soul within his own body. (The Islets of Langerhans, for those who slept through biology class, are not found in any ocean but refer to a feature of the human pancreas.)

With the help of a scientist friend, a microscopic clone ("mite") of Talbot is created and inserted into his own full size body, beginning a months-long quest that is as much metaphysical as it is anatomical. As Talbot's mite, travelling by tiny boat, finally closes in on the corporeal estate of his soul, he suddenly finds himself amidst a cache of lost childhood treasures.

"When at last he reached the shore of the pancreatic sea, he found a great many things he had lost or given away when he was a child. He found a wooden machine gun on a tripod, painted olive drab, that made a rat-tat-tatting sound when a wooden handle was cranked. He found a set of toy soldiers, two companies, one Prussian and the other French, with a miniature Napoleon Bonaparte among them. He found a microscope kit with slides and petri dishes and racks of chemicals in nice little bottles, all of which bore uniform labels. He found a milk bottle filled with Indian-head pennies. He found a hand puppet with the head of a monkey and the name Rosco painted on the fabric glove with nail polish. He found a pedometer. ... He found a box of radio premiums: a cardboard detective kit with fingerprint dusting powder, invisible ink and a list of police-band call codes...

But there was something missing.

He could not remember what it was, but it was important. ...

Whatever was missing was very important."

I wonder if LisaBug has any regrets about her own lost childhood treasures.

Is she missing something very important, but cannot remember what it is? Is there a hole in her soul, an empty space perfectly fitted to a copy of Ghostly Gallery?

And if I were to start tearing pages out of her book, will she suddenly, inexplicably, clutch her heart..?

Animated adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree released to DVD!

Just a quick announcement, the 1993 animated adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree, (narrated by Bradbury himself, and featuring the voice of Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Moundshroud) has finally been released to DVD this week as part of Warner Archives burn-on-demand program. (It had previously only been available on a long out-of-print VHS and has never been officially released to DVD before.)

I previously posted about the book itself, and as far as adaptations go, prefer the Colonial Radio Theater audiobook version which I mentioned in that earlier post, but this 1-hour, 10-minute Hanna Barbera animated production is still worth a look, and is a worthy addition to any collection of Halloween Specials.

I'm a big fan of the Warner Archive burn-on-demand program, which has brought several of my favorite "wish list" titles to market, including Bad Ronald, the original TV-version of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Two on a Guillotine, The Green Slime, The Last Dinosaur, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Power, the William Castle horror anthology TV show Ghost Story (aka Circle of Fear), Saturday morning favorites Thundarr The Barbarian and Valley of the Dinosaurs... sheesh, I could keep going!

Buy The Halloween Tree on DVD here.

Man From the South (1960, Alfred Hitchcock Presents)

The scene is Las Vegas, circa 1960.

While lounging in a casino coffee shop one morning, a down-on-his luck gambler (Steve McQueen) politely lights the cigarette of an older stranger, Carlos (Peter Lorre). Admiring the gambler's lighter, Carlos proposes a bizarre but intriguing bet. If McQueen can light his lighter ten times in succession without it misfiring once, Carlos will hand him the keys to his brand new Cadillac parked out front.

If he loses, McQueen will give up something he can afford to lose... the pinky finger of his left hand. At first McQueen dismisses the proposition as the ramblings of a crazy old man. But after further goading by Carlos, and an explanation of exactly how he plans to claim the finger should McQueen lose the bet (with a meat cleaver!), McQueen agrees.

McQueen and two bystanders follow Carlos to his luxurious hotel room, where his left hand is tied down with some twine between two nails, Carlos readies the cleaver, and the bet begins.

A tense count of seven successful lighter strikes later, a woman suddenly bursts into the room and wrestles the cleaver from Carlos' hand. It is his wife, who scolds Carlos for betting again while she was away.

Carlos has nothing to bet with, she explains. The Cadillac belongs to her, along with everything else he once owned. You see, it took her awhile, but she won all of it. As she reaches for the car keys, we notice she has only two fingers on her left hand.

From the fifth season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, "Man From the South" is an adaptation of a 1948 short story by Roald Dahl (which can be read in various Dahl compendiums, including The Umbrella Man and Other Stories.)

The story has such an instantly captivating hook, suspenseful final act and satisfying surprise payoff, it remains one of the more talked about Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, and has found its way to the screen more than once.

The premier episode of Tales of the Unexpected (1979), an anthology show based exclusively on the short works of Dahl and hosted by the author himself, presented a version more faithful to Dahl's original text, which sets the story at a Jamaican beach resort instead of Sin City.

But probably the most intense version is the 1985 remake done for The (New) Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which stars John Huston as Carlos and Kim Novak as his wife, and manages to dial up the tension even further by having Novak's surprise entrance cause a draft that blows out the lighter flame, bringing down Carlos' eager cleaver for a near miss before she stops the bet.

Director Quentin Tarantino even paid homage to the story for his segment of the 1995 anthology film "Four Rooms", in which a group of drunken New Years Eve celebrants, among them Tarantino and Bruce Willis, are discussing the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode and decide to carry out the bet themselves, enlisting the aid of the bellboy, played by Tim Roth. As derivative as this premise is, Tarantino manages to make it his own with additional character nuances and a surprise ending.

I was familiar with director Alfred Hitchcock at a young age (see my previous post on his spooky story collection for children, Ghostly Gallery). As it happens, my introduction to the original Alfred Hitchcock Presents show, which I first caught in reruns on PBS sometime in the early 80s, was with the fifth season.

And what a great season to get started with, for it contains not only "Man From the South", but several other notable and memorable episodes. My favorite is the Robert Bloch penned "The Cuckoo Clock", in which a woman staying alone in a remote cabin gets an unexpected visit from an unstable stranger who may or may not be an escaped, mentally disturbed murderer.

A cuckoo clock in the cabin becomes the focus of attention for several characters, serving as a motif of madness.

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a competent adaptation of the dark Ambrose Bierce Civil-War chiller we all remember from English class.

In "Special Delivery", based on a short story by Ray Bradbury, a boy starts a mushroom farm in his basement after ordering seeds through a comic book ad. But is there more to these mushrooms than meets the eye? A scene where Dad approaches his increasingly distant son in the dark basement and is ordered by his son to eat a mushroom sandwich had me squirming in my seat.

Finally, there is the exclusive, members-only restaurant depicted in "Specialty of the House", which serves a seasonal dish that seems to coincide with the loss of one of its members.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Complete Fifth Season, featuring all of the episodes described above, is available now on DVD.

The Halloween Tree (1972, Ray Bradbury)

Ray Bradbury's scary stories are frequently steeped in the atmosphere and iconography of Halloween, but his 1973 book The Halloween Tree is perhaps the consummate expression of his love for All Hallows' Eve.

The first edition cover art, painted by longtime Bradbury collaborator Joseph Mugnaini.

Set entirely on one Halloween night, it's the adventure of eight boys, each dressed for trick-or-treats as a different spooky archetype (skeleton, Jack-O-Lantern, a witch, the grim reaper, etc.) who are led by the mysterious Mr. Moundshroud on a journey through time and space to experience the various cultural traditions that preceded and shaped our modern Halloween.

This oil painting by Ray Bradbury, titled "The Halloween Tree", precedes the book by 12 years.

The adventure appropriately begins at this exemplar haunted house, home of an old wizard, Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud, who invites eight trick-or-treating visitors to learn why they dress in costumes and go door to door to collect candy every October 31st.

The boys' mode of transportation on this bewitched tour is a giant patchwork kite, pieced together from the leftover scraps of a hundred carnival posters and powered by Moundshroud's magic.

Illustration from the book.

"Halloween", a 1981 painting by Mugnaini that does not appear in the book.

In the course of one Halloween night, Moundshroud and company will visit the burial rituals of ancient Egypt, a Dia De Los Muertos celebration in Mexico, the Festival of the Dead in mythic Greece, and a Druid harvest festival.

The story feels, at times, like merely a framework for Bradbury to hang his anthropological lessons on, but its still an enjoyable and educational read.

In 1993, The Halloween Tree was adapted into a (mostly mediocre) full-length animated film, currently only available on an out-of-print VHS.

UPDATE: Now available on DVD through the Warner Archives burn-on-demand program!


I recommend this radio dramatization performed by the Colonial Radio Players. It's unabridged and fully realized with music, sound effects, and actors performing the dialogue. It's available on an inexpensive
2-CD set featuring this gorgeous cover art.



For the past few Halloween seasons, Disneyland has decorated a Frontierland tree with pumpkins in homage to Ray Bradbury. Photo stolen from flickr.

Each chapter of the book is marked by a drawing of a different Halloween mask. Here they are.