If you're already sick of Halloween thanks to the proliferation of plastic pumpkins, rubber Scream masks and chocolate rolls filled with green goo that are clogging up the aisles of your local supermarket, then you need to kick back and read something that adheres to the true spirit of the season.
Just as the real meaning of Christmas isn't likely to be found inside a luxury Marks and Spencer cracker, so the real Halloween feeling - the onset of an extended period of darkness heralded by the death and decay of the natural world and a seemingly thinner veil between what we know and what we fear - can only be delivered by Ray Bradbury.
From the moment I discovered two volumes of Bradbury short stories in the dusty, old-fashioned mobile library that used to visit my street every Tuesday - a wonder-filled anachronism-on-wheels, overseen by an enigmatic white-haired man, the whole thing itself straight out of a Bradbury story - I was hooked. Every year when the leaves start falling from the trees and the clocks go back, my eyes start to drift towards the Bradbury volumes on my bookshelf. And so, I respectfully advise, should yours.
Forget his science fiction stuff - Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles (a series of shorts originally collected as The Silver Locusts) - for Halloween, at least. Instead I point you to Something Wicked This Way Comes, in which the deliciously-named Jim Nightshade and William Halloway have to contend with a sinister travelling carnival. It's been filmed and is also currently a stage play touring Scotland. Also to The October Country, 15 heart-breakingly beautiful nuggets of autumnal confectionery. Witness the carnival dwarf who secretly visits the hall of mirrors to see himself in "normal" proportions. Find out just what's weird about those crowds of rubberneckers that always form around car accidents. And I defy you to read, on a dark and stormy night, The Wind and not feel a chill run up and down your spine … even though absolutely nothing of a paranormal nature takes place.
The October Country also includes two stories featuring Bradbury's recurring Elliott family cast of characters; essentially, an Addams Family with a slightly darker yet, conversely, a folksier twist. In one, Uncle Einar has wings but can't risk flying lest he be seen by normal people, and in another the Elliott clan converges for a very special family gathering.
Perhaps the most perfect Elliott family story of all is the short story The April Witch, in which magical Cecy longs to fall in love. That one appears in the collection The Golden Apples of the Sun, but all the Elliott stories were collected a few years ago as a semi-novel with bridging material, entitled From The Dust Returned.
Bradbury presents to us the familiar and cosy and and up-ends it, but never in a shocking or sensational way. There's horror in Bradbury's stories - why else would I be recommending him for Halloween? - but it's not the horror of blood and gore. It's the horror of ringing telephones, the horror of the realisation that something inside you - a growing baby, perhaps, or a collection of bones - is alien and disturbing, the horror of a world where simply walking aimlessly through the dark night is something suspicious and possibly illegal.
Ray Bradbury himself has had the sort of life only he could have dreamed up - he is descended from a woman who was tried for witchcraft at Salem, and claims he took up writing after a very Bradbury-esque character called Mr Electrico touched him with an electrified sword at a carnival in 1932 and exhorted him to "live forever!".
At 88, Bradbury is making a decent fist of Mr Electrico's command. He continues to write, and while his newer work might not have the heady, almost naive magic of those early stories, he stands as a bulwark against the twin forces of commerciality and consumerism which threaten the idea of Halloween as something worth quietly celebrating.
