Picture Book/Modern Fairy Tale: Pumpkin Light, by David Ray

I really wanted to like this, as I love Halloween, and I really enjoy modern created fairy tales (Jane Yolen's Girl in the Golden Bower is a perfect example), but I was not entranced or even interested in this stolid story with little magic or interest, and painfully workmanlike illustrations.

Pumpkin Light
David Ray
ISBN: 0399220283

I wanted to like it - a book about an early Americana farm boy who loves pumpkins and gets cursed?  Sounds great!  Sadly, the author/illustrator bit off more than he could chew, with both the story and the illustrations getting away from him right from the beginning.  This is a quote from the set-up of the story; "Now there was one other thing Angus loved as much as his mother and father and almost as much as pumpkins and that was to draw and paint."

Just, no.  I'm sorry to be blunt, but those are not the lines of a good story, or a good tale to read aloud to someone.  Sadly, it was like that all the way through.


Bare bones story:
Pumpkin-loving artistic kid stays up too late on Halloween, gets sent to bed without supper, has a very complex bad dream, and wakes to find everything better again.

Longer version:
Angus was born in the fall, under a pumpkin sun, and loves pumpkins and art.  He always goes to town on Halloween to draw the jack o'lantern display at the General Store, then goes home and hangs his pictures on his bedroom walls.  One Halloween he stays too late drawing and runs home (past jeering children who are out there being hateful for no reason at all) and returns home after dark to angry parents who send him to sleep with no dinner, and no pumpkin pie, and no time to hang his drawings on the walls.

Suddenly he's in a hayloft in a barn overlooking his house, watching his mother set a pumpkin pie out on the windowsill to cool.  He's hungry, so he sneaks over, steals the pie, and hides under a scarecrow (why god why) to eat it.  The spirit of the scarecrow (because there has to be a scarecrow spirit) is angry at him for stealing the pie when he was sent to bed with  no supper.  So the scarecrow turns him into a dog, and names him Autumn (Why?  Who knows.) and passes on the terms of the curse - "Autumn" has to spend every night in the barn loft, guarding a "magic pumpkin" (wtf?) until "a forgiving soul carves it and releases the power to change you back into a boy."  Ok.

So now Angus' parents are super sad because their little boy is gone, but the little dog keeps them company, except it insists on sleeping in the loft (and no one asks why this dog is so attached to the loft, or ever goes to check).  A whole bloody year later, somehow the parents magically know the dog's name is Autumn (not even going there) and the boy-dog finally gets a clue that perhaps he can trick Mom into carving the magic pumpkin for her (apparently only once-a-year) pumpkin pie.

He nips and drags at her until she gets up there, sees this lovely pumpkin, and (still not asking WHY a pumpkin is in her hayloft) she drags it home and begins to cut it open, but overcome with memories, decides to try to carve it into a jack o'lantern like her missing son would have done.  The pumpkin lights up magically, and yay, Angus is back!   About here is where I notice that dad has gone suspiciously missing through this whole ordeal.

The light from the pumpkin grows brighter and blinds the magically recovered boy, and when he blinks to clear his eyes, he's home in bed, with his parents hanging up his pictures on his walls, and a pumpkin pie smell wafting in from the kitchen (she baked a fresh one for breakfast, apparently).  A lengthy (everything about this book is lengthy) coda explains how Angus always afterwards treasured a special painting of a dog and a pumpkin.


Ok, so this is obviously trying for Film!Oz territory, where it's all a dream, or is it!?  However, it just seemed like it was trying too hard.  A scarecrow spirit cursing a boy for disobedience ought to be right up fairy-tale alley, easy to accept, but it fell flat, and begged for an explanation.  Why a dog?  Why the deal with guarding the pumpkin?  What would happen if he didn't?  It just didn't make any sense, but so much time was spent explaining things that didn't need explaining, it made the magical (and not-explained) personages and events stick out terribly.

I hate when this sort of thing happens, because I want to fix the story, and it isn't mine, and I can't do anything about it.  Perhaps I'll write my own Halloween fairy-tale with a jack o'lantern obsessed child and see if I can do any better.