A Long Dark Path

Strip away the candy aisle, the driveway inflatables, the child in a superhero cape. Something older is standing underneath - something walked, in one form or another, for the better part of two thousand years.

This is the story of that walk.

A Long Dark Path follows the holiday from the fire festivals of the Celtic world, through the centuries when the Church laid All Saints and All Souls over the same dark corner of the calendar, across the Atlantic in the belongings of Irish and Scottish immigrants, and into the American street where it lives now. It is a story of survival by disguise - a festival that changed costume every time the world around it changed, and by changing, survived.

Along the way it takes up the questions the season keeps asking. Why does the year's turning fall here, at the end of harvest, when the light fails? What did people believe was moving on that night, and why carve a face to meet it? How did souling and guising become trick-or-treat? Why did the turnip surrender to the pumpkin? And why does a culture that no longer believes in the returning dead still spend one night a year dressed as them?

The honest answers are not always the tidy ones. Where the evidence is thin, this book says so. Where the popular story has outrun the record - and on Halloween it frequently has - the record gets its say. The result is not a debunking. It is better than that: the real history is stranger, older, and more human than the version handed down in holiday specials.

Because underneath the plastic, the old function survives. One night when the boundary is thin. One night to walk out in the dark wearing a face that is not your own. One night to let the dead come to the door and be fed, so that they will go away again satisfied.

We still do it. We simply stopped saying why.

From the author of Winter Solstice in Eureka Springs and Eureka Springs Folk Magic comes a history of the darkest night on the Western calendar - and of the long, unbroken path that brought it to your front porch.