Blog-o-ween 2023: Ray Bradbury

There are some writers whose works fairly scream “Halloween!” When you pick up one of their books, the air immediately turns crisp and cool. The smells of apple cider and burning leaves waft from the pages. And as you read them, you are transported to a world where the days grow shorter, the shadows longer, and the terrors richer. The world becomes a place where dogs bring back home more than cockle burrs in their fur, where trains stop at ghost towns in the middle of the night, and where fairground organs play dark tunes that only the dead can hear.

Today’s featured artist is probably best known for his tales of rocketships going to Mars and of firemen who start fires rather than extinguish them, but Ray Bradbury’s first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947 by August Derleth’s Arkham House, a small publishing company dedicated to weird fiction in the Lovecraftian vein. (Pun intended! Heh-heh-heh!) Later, in 1955, fifteen of these outré tales would be joined by four new stories to become The October Country.

Today for Blog-o-ween, let’s jump in the car and go for a drive. Our good friend Ray is behind the wheel, and he seems to know these roads like the back of his hand. (Which seems odd, because Bradbury never learned to drive, and he had a lifelong aversion to cars.) While we motor along, he’ll tell us some of the tales he’s picked up in previous trips into this country. Strange tales, weird tales, tales of...The October Country...

Our first stop is “The Emissary” and we’ll visit the bedside of a sick young boy by the name of Martin. He’s been homebound for many months. His only contact with the outside world is through his dog. Dog runs through the streets of the town, the fields that lay beyond it, and every place in between, collecting bits and pieces of debris in his fur. Once home, Martin examines Dog’s pelt and learns of life outside his sick room. Dog brings friends, too, like Miss Haight, Martin’s teacher. Soon after, however, Miss Haight is killed in a car accident. And soon after that, Dog brings back to Martin the mud of the graveyard in his fur...and something else...company!

Let’s head a little further down the road, and visit “The Small Assassin.” Alice Leiber is a brand new mother. But Alice doesn’t feel motherly towards her baby. In fact, she feels downright hostile, as if the baby were trying to hurt her. Her husband, David, and her pediatrician, Dr. Jeffers, do everything to assuage her fears, but Alice won’t be talked out of something she knows to be true: her baby is trying to kill her. Then, one day, Dr. Jeffers makes a house call, and finds...well that falls under patient-doctor confidentiality.

Well, it seems we’ve gotten into a little fender-bender. Maybe having Ray drive wasn’t such a hot idea, after all. Strange, how a gaggle of rubber-neckers has shown up so quickly. It reminds Ray of a story called “The Crowd.” In it, a man named Spallner gets into a car accident. A crowd of on-lookers shows up and presses around him. He is convinced that they are trying to kill him. He survives, but becomes obsessed with the idea of the crowd and their machinations. He collects newspaper clippings and photographs of other accidents. In these photos are the same people, time after time, year after year. Who are they? What does the crowd want with Spallner?

Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. His family moved back and forth between Waukegan and Tucson, Arizona, in the late 1920s and early 1930s while his father looked for employment. Finally, the family settled in Los Angeles, California, in 1934, and Ray’s creative life began in earnest.

An avid reader, writer, and moviegoer, Bradbury published his first story in Forrest J. Ackerman’s fanzine Imagination! in 1938. In 1942, at the age of twenty-two, “The Lake” sold for $13.75. By the time he was twenty-four, Bradbury was a full-time writer.

A list of all of the books and stories that Ray Bradbury gave to the world would be a lengthy blog post all by itself. Suffice to say, the man was prolific. All of the stories that we talked about today can be found in his book, The October Country, which can be found in print or audio at your local library.

You can also find them as episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater, which ran on First Choice Superchannel in Canada and HBO in the United States in 1985 and 1986. Later seasons were run on USA Network until 1992. The show was an anthology series that featured Bradbury’s stories. These shows starred actors such as Jeff Goldblum, Eugene Levy, Peter O’Toole, Megan Follows, and so many more. Currently you can find The Ray Bradbury Theater on Pluto TV and Amazon Prime.

Audio-wise, we’ve got you covered. Here is a reading of “The Small Assassin” released by Caedmon Records in 1981 and performed by he man himself:

Tony Walker and his excellent Classic Ghost Stories Podcast presents the story of “The Crowd.”

And here is a fun one. Back in October of 1984, a group of actors came together at The Directors Guild of America in Hollywood to broadcast a live performance of Ray Bradbury’s stories. Actors like June Lockhart, Lynn Redgrave, Casey Kasam, Gary Owens and others brought to life the stories “There Was an Old Woman,” “The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone,” and...“The Emissary.” You can find the recording of that magical night here on the Internet Archive.

Well, that’s all for today. I hope you had a nice trip with us to The October Country. Sorry about the bumps in the road. Ray seemed to hit every single one of them, wouldn’t you say? He’s a talented writer, if not much of a driver. Still, the apple cider that we picked up at that roadside stand was delicious. Why, I’d bet my life that if you warmed some up tonight and stuck a stick of cinnamon in it, you’d be guaranteed to have...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!