One hundred years ago today, on August 22 1920 Raymond Doglas Bradbury was born in the town of Waukegan, Illinois. He died a little over 8 years ago in June 2012. In between those dates he produced some of the finest and most unforgettable literature ever written.
I first discovered him aged about 13 or 14 through his short work. That first story was The Emissary. I read it in an anthology whose name I no longer remember. I still remember that final sentence, though, and all the threat/horror,/general nastiness implied in those three words... Three words that had been used early on in the story to truly happy effect, but he gave them a whole new meaning at the end of the tale.
That story was so far above and beyond everything else in that anthology that I knew I had to look this writer up and see what else he had to offer.
I went straight to WH Smiths and found the collection which contained that story. That was of course, The October Country. To this day, I believe this to be one of the strongest single author short story collections ever written.The Scythe, the Wind, The Jar, Skeleton... these are all amazing stories.
This collection is one of the central reasons that I read horror fiction to this day. It showed me how varied the world of horror can be.
I started picking up Bradbury's books wherever I could find them. I still have the majority of those old paperbacks 30 years later and they're my most read books by some margin.
He was a master of the short story form. Several of his stories feature the best and most shocking last lines I've ever read - for example.
"And then some idiot turned on the lights."
"It was when the jellyfish called you by name..."
"Martin had company."
They might seem innoccuous out of context like this, but they chill you to the core at the end of their repspective stories.
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| My first Bradbury books |
A Piece of Wood (the title is also the last line if I recall correctly) is one of the great science fiction short stories, and it's mainly two people sat in an office talking philosophical ideas about humanity's capacity for hurting each other.
The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl is another all time favourite of mine. A killer tries to clean his traces from the house of his victim, and cleans the house from top to bottom. That's all that happens in the story but it's compulsive, we're stuck in the character's head as his cleaning becomes more obsessive and his insanity more pronounced.
He wrote longer work too. He has several novels to his name. Some of those are composite novels, created by stringing his short stories together to make a longer narrative. The others are traditional full length works. The most famous of his composite novels are The Martian Chronicles and the autobiographical Dandelion Wine.
IMHO the most successful of his patchworked novels were Dandelion Wine and Green Shadows White Whale. GSWW was another autobiaographical work, this time tellimg the story of his time living in Ireland while he wrote the Moby Dick screenplay for John Huston. These two feel like actual novels, as if they were written in the long form.
His other composite novels don't hold together as well as extended narratives and feel like collections of short stories on a theme. Very very good short story collections, but short story collections nonetheless.
Fahrenheit 451 was a true revelation to me when I read it. It's more relevant now than it ever has been. It's not strictly speaking about censorship, it's about the dumbing down of society, replacing literature with huge TV screens that can almost cover walls, and the interactive games on those giant screens... It's about keeping the people dumb so they can be easily controlled. That could never happen could it? Scarily prescient is the best way to describe it. Oh, and the Mechanical hound is one of the most frightening things in any of Bradbury's work.
I was rereading Fahrenheit 451 in June 1996. I lived in a tower block, on the 16th floor, with my living room windows overlooking the cities of Salford and Manchester. i was near the end of the book, at the point where the war came and Montag and the others are watching from a distance as the planes fly over. The book tells of the bombs falling from the planes, landing on the city, the resultant explosions...
The next line of the book is "A second later, the sound came." The instant I read that line, there was the most enormous bang and my windows rattled. My first though was 'fuck me, the book's got sound effects'. I looked up and there was a plume of smoke over Manchester. As I found out a few minutes later, the IRA had just blown up the city centre. The timimg on hitting that exact sentence at that moment, freaks me out to this day.
Something Wicked this Way Comes is possibly my favourite of his novels, although it's a tough choice between that F451. I must have read them both 6 times each at least. Although I only have two copies of Something Wicked and 4 copies of F451. Jonathan Pryce in the movie was perfect as Mr Dark.
Bradbury also wrote plays and screenplays and helped design sections of the Epcot Centre at DisneyWorld..
Bradbury was one of the biggest infuences on my taste in fiction. His influence is spread everywhere. Stephen King and neil Gaiman have both cited Bradbury as a major influence. Speilberg stated that Close encounters would not have ben made if he'd never watched It came from Outer Space. When Bradbury died, even President Obama was moved to realease a statement about his impact on American culture.
Despite no longer being here in body, Ray Bradbury will live forever. he leaves behind an almost unrivalled body of work. When he was good, he was the best in his field. When he wasn't quite that good, he still beat most of the competition.
On this, your hundredth birthday, I am raising a glass of whisky in your honour Mr Bradbury. I can't imagine my life without your work in it. You are one of the few writiers I can say changed the way I look at the world.
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