“We are the October People, the autumn folk. That is the truth in an almond husk, a nightweed shell.”

• Title: From the Dust Returned
• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Genre: Horror/Fantasy
• Year: 2001

From the Dust Returned is another trip with Ray Bradbury into October Country, this time located roughly in upper Illinois. It is a fix-up novel in the vein of The Martian Chronicles, collecting short stories from several previous Bradbury anthologies — most prominently The October Country — and weaving them together with new material into an episodic but thematically coherent novel that tells the story of one very unusual family.

It is a story that Bradbury says he has been revisiting for decades (from 1945 to 2000), without ever really realizing it. Fans will recognize many of the stories and characters here — from Cecy the irrepressible rider of souls to the winged Uncle Einar. From the Dust Returned takes these old friends and finally meshes all their stories together into one narrative history of the Elliott family — a many-generationed clan with their origins in ancient Egypt. The Elliotts are, for lack of a better term, creatures of the night.

From the Dust Returned is essentially an extended riff on ‘Homecoming’ and the shorts related to it such as ‘Uncle Einar’ (both in The October Country) and ‘West of October’ (in The Toynbee Convector). If you liked those stories, and ‘Homecoming’ in particular, you will like this book, which magnifies the idea of the reunion of this otherworldly family and gives us a brief look at their last days — for the Elliotts are coming into conflict with the modern world, a world that no longer believes in the things that go bump in the night.

What is new in From the Dust Returned is both rewritten and expanded sections for each story (for example this version of ‘Uncle Einar’ has him purposefully seeking a wife, rather than accidentally happening upon one) as well as additional vignettes and shorts that round out the whole family and tell of their ultimate fate. Timothy, the normal lad who is the central character of ‘Homecoming’ and has had trouble adjusting to life with a family of immortal — and possibly vampiric — eccentrics, occupies the role of family historian, and is our anchor amidst this strange family of shape changers, Egyptian mummies, ghosts, and coffin-sleepers.

Bradbury’s light touch is still there, and this strange family is ever more human than it is monstrous, and the qualities that ensured ‘Homecoming’ was rejected from Weird Tales in the forties are the guiding principles of this novel of 2001– namely, this is a story about human relationships, family, and the passage of time, not ghouls and goblins. Thus we have a tale in which four randy and adventurous young men have their souls trapped in the body of their ancient grandfather, only to find his lifetime’s memories are adventure enough to satisfy their every craving; a story in which a sick passenger on the Orient Express is discovered to be suffering from an ailment of the modern world, for his kind is not longer believed in; and another of a man who feels trapped by his family only to find in them the source of his own redemption. As always, Bradbury’s stories are human stories, and From the Dust Returned features some of his most lyrical invocations and elegiac imagery to create the sort of dark fantastic fiction that prizes the somber and the beautiful over the shrill and shocking.

• From the Dust Returned at Amazon
• Ray Bradbury’s website

A carnival should be all growls, roars like timberlands stacked, bundled, rolled and crashed, great explosions of lion dust, men ablaze with working anger, pop bottles jangling, horse buckles shivering, engines and elephants in full stampede through rains of sweat while zebras neighed and trembled like cage trapped in cage.

But this was like old movies, the silent theater haunted with black-and-white ghosts, silvery mouths opening to let moonlight smoke out, gestures made in silence so hushed you could feel the wind fizz the hair on your cheeks.

• Title: Something Wicked This Way Comes
• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Genre: Horror/Fantasy
• Year: 1962

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the quintessential Ray Bradbury novel, one that combines the many threads and themes of his lifelong work in a book that is equal parts weird tale, small town reminiscence, and celebration of life. It stands alongside The October Country as the purest expression of Bradbury’s brand of horror-fantasy, something that combines the supernatural with real and relatable human fears, inflected with an autumnal style that blends exuberance with bittersweet nostalgia.

This is a novel about growing up, and growing old, but ultimately about seizing hold of the life you have and living it. Best friends Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade are boys on the cusp of adulthood in the small town of Green Town, Illinois, and their ordinary world of boyhood adventures and philosophies is drawn with a familiarity and enthusiasm by Bradbury that rivals the best coming-of-age novels. So too does Bradbury take pains to distinguish his two protagonists, Will the innocent and Jim the world-hungry, and their different personas determine the way they experience the sinister and seductive carnival that steals into town one October night.

Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show is the dark carnival that menaces our protagonists. Rolling into town in the dead of night on a black train whistling a funeral dirge — an event witnessed by Will and Jim — from the start it’s clear that this circus is no ordinary troupe of entertainers. Will and Jim soon stumble upon the Shadow Show’s dark secrets, and come to be hunted by Messieurs Cooger and Dark over the course of the novel.

Like any carnival, the Shadow Show deals in illusions and promises, but with a difference. Much of the best and most evocative writing of the novel occurs as the people of Green Town feel the temptations awaiting them out in the fairgrounds. For Will’s father this is especially true, a man who feels he has grown old and allowed to much of life to slip him by, and would like nothing more than to go back and revisit his youth. Which is exactly what the Shadow Show offers, a chance to go back.

But for Jim, seduced by the promises of the grown-up world whereas Will remains untouched, the temptation is to be an adult, to stop having to wait for the things he wants to experience. Something as innocent as a Merry-Go-Round becomes the instrument of these promises of youth or maturity, false promises that only curse the recipient and fuel Cooger and Dark’s huger for suffering and sorrow. Bradbury’s imagistic and unexpected prose paints a picture of a carnival gone rotten at its core, where the simple fun of the Mirror Maze can become a trap, and the freaks of the freakshow are not people born with an affliction, but those enslaved and twisted by the dark power of the carnival.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a quick but memorable read, and really shows Bradbury’s talents for the concrete realities of small town life and the thrills and pitfalls of growing up. The scares here come out of human temptation, of the willingness of people to become what they are not and leave what they love behind to satisfy their own lingering unhappiness or unfulfilled dreams. Combine this with great atmosphere and a host of strange characters, and you have perfect October reading.

• Something Wicked This Way Comes at Amazon
• Ray Bradbury’s website

Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony,  from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.

• Title: Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Inside You
• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Genre: Nonfiction — Writing
• Year: 1990 (1961 -86)

I’ll say from the start that the title and sub-title of this book is a turn-off. If, like me, you roll your eyes whenever a publisher sticks a hot buzz word on the cover of book, then seeing yet another self-help manual promising some mystical far-eastern secrets that will change your life* is an invitation to walk away. If the name ‘Ray Bradbury’ wasn’t on the cover, I would have done just that.

So, let’s talk about what this book actually is, rather than what it appears to be. It is not a unified manual on writing, but rather a collection of essays and other material from various points in Bradbury’s career. It is not an exploration of the practical or mechanical aspects of writing, for the most part, but instead reveals Bradbury’s own writing philosophy and uncontainable exuberance in an inspiring way. And it is not, really, about Zen at all — or say rather it includes Zen in a completely different way than any of those other ‘how-to’s’ that slap the word on the cover. Those books take Zen as their starting point, and see whatever process they are dissecting through its lens. Bradbury, who admits in the essay from which the title of the book was taken that he knew little at all about Zen, discusses writing through his own deep experience and reveals those truths he has arrived at the hard way — a few of which just happen to share some common threads with Zen thought. The important word on the cover of this book, then, is not ‘Zen,’ but ‘Bradbury.’

The book opens with ‘The Joy of Writing,’ which would have been a far more appropriate title for a book about writing from Ray Bradbury — a man whose passion and love for the craft is positively electric. It is an essay about enthusiasm, about the need to explore what you really care about in your work — both that which irritates and that which inspires you. Bradbury describes how giving your character one of your own strongly held beliefs and turning him loose is a great way to find a story worth telling, a story only you can tell. Such a technique is best done in a white heat of passion; as Bradbury says take today to explode, for tomorrow you can always pour cold critical water on the hot coals of your first draft.

‘Run Fast, Stand Still’ is perhaps the most interesting of the essays from a practical standpoint. Bradbury ruminates further on his somewhat Zenlike approach to a first draft — by putting things down on paper faster than your critical mind can keep up with you will arrive at a truer piece of self-expression, one more authentically yours. As a child and young man, Bradbury imitated all his favorite authors, Poe, Burroughs, Dickens, Lovecraft, and Wells, and it wasn’t until he wrote honestly about his own experiences that he found his voice. One way to get in touch with his own voice was to write in a headlong burst of enthusiasm.

Another was with word-association. Fans of Bradbury will be quite familiar with titles like ‘The Crowd,’ ‘Skeleton,’ ‘ The Lake,’ or ‘The Winds,’ stories that indeed started out as nouns in a list of concepts Bradbury dug up from his subconscious in free writing exercises. Nearly all of the ideas he generated as a young man in such a way later found themselves into stories, including many of his classics. What Bradbury found was that by taking one of these nouns he could find a story not by thinking about it, but by writing about it. By starting the day with free-writing, Bradbury began by creating an essay/prose-poem about whatever subject he had selected and invariably found that, after about a half a page of this playful and relaxed writing, he had written himself into the beginnings of a story.

A great technique, one that I’ve seen mentioned before and one that Bradbury arrived at on his own after years of working on his dream of becoming a writer. And it’s a pretty zen approach to the craft as well — active creation by doing, not thinking. In ‘How to Keep and Feed a Muse’ Bradbury creates a prescription for drawing further on the subconscious mind when he recommends potential writers read a poem and an essay every day to keep the mental muscles working and supply the mind with a broad variety of material.  He says that his own muse grew out of “a mulch of good, bad, and indifferent,” and cautions the writer never to discard a passion just because he had grown out of it. The quote at the top of this review is taken from this essay, and reveals Bradbury’s philosophy toward high art and pop culture — everything is of benefit to the writer and to the self.

“Exactly one half terror, exactly one half exhilaration . . .” is the message of ‘Drunk and In Charge of  a Bicycle.’  The nature of this book of collected essays that span the course of Bradbury’s career is that it often repeats itself, and much of the essence of this essay is explored in the preceding sections of this book. But, being Bradbury, it is still entertaining and inspiring reading. This essay and a few of the others — the prefaces to editions of Dandelion Wine and Fahrenheit 451 — are as much about Bradbury’s life and the history behind many of his stories, as they are about writing.

The final essay on craft is the titular ‘Zen in the Art of Writing,’ an essay that originally appeared in one of those trendy ‘Zen and the Art of _______’ books. In it Bradbury demonstrates that his approach to work really does line-up with some of precepts of Zen thinking, in that he emphasizes relaxing and letting your subconscious, the ‘real you’ that is living in the moment, do the work. Work becomes play, play becomes work, and Bradbury lets his fingers do the thinking for him (a sensation I am thankfully well-acquainted with myself). None of this is possible if the aspiring writer is keeping an eye on commercial or literary success Bradbury argues, but only when the writer loses himself in the moment.

Zen in the Art of Writing is really about inspiration, which is only fitting from a writer like Bradbury who is one of the most exuberant and infectiously enthusiastic writers of any genre (just watch this video of a talk from a still sharp eighty-some-year-old Bradbury in 2001 for an idea of what I mean). It is perhaps best enjoyed in multiple sittings, dipping in to read an essay or two every couple of days or so. Fans of Bradbury’s will relish the anecdotes and life lessons from his career and, perhaps, ultimately be glad that this is not a practical how-to manual — it does not distill the magic of the Grandmaster into any sort of mechanical process or approach. Seen from that perspective, it is only fitting that Bradbury’s sole book on writing is more about maintaining one’s zest for art — and for life — than on putting words on the page.

*As opposed to actual explorations of Zen philosophy, which I find fascinating. Very few of the popular ‘Zen’ books of the past have any but a superficial and sensationalistic approach to Zen or Chan Buddhism.

• Zen in the Art of Writing at Amazon
• Ray Bradbury’s website

As I’m on a bit of a Ray Bradbury kick lately (with it being October and all) I was excited to come across two videos of a long talk he gave in 2001 over at Bill the Sci-Fi Guy’s site, From a Sci-Fi Standpoint. The lecture is about an hour, with a follow-up interview that lasts about 30 minutes. In it Bradbury talks about writing and his approach to the craft, the origins of some of his books, and lots of personal anecdotes from his life and career.

Bradbury is showing his age in these talks, but he’s still sharp and, above all, passionate about writing and reading and living. Anyone familiar with his work will hear the echoes of his prose in these talks, which are a inspirational glimpse at one of the living treasures of imaginative fiction.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W-r7ABrMYU

And the follow-up interview:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU51N2s3B78

Martin knew it was autumn again, for Dog ran into the house bringing wind and frost and a smell of apples turned to cider under trees. In dark clock-springs of hair, Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, acorn-husk, hair of squirrel, feather of departed robin, sawdust from fresh-cut cordwood, and leaves like charcoals shaken from a blaze of maple trees. Dog jumped. Showers of brittle fern, blackberry vine, marsh-grass sprang over the bed where Martin shouted. No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!

• Title: The October Country
• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Genre: Horror/Fantasy
• Year: 1955

Ray Bradbury’s importance to the literature of the 20th century extends beyond the limits of genre to embrace all of fiction, and to our broader culture itself. Justly renowned for titles like Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Illustrated Man, Bradbury has been a distinct, and distinctly American, voice in speculative fiction for over half a century. It’s a shame he isn’t as widely read as he is admired, or that so many people forget just how sophisticated, how varied, and how spectacular a writer he really is having, perhaps, read a book or story or two of his in junior high English and assumed he was just one of those boring old writers that were a perennial favorite of school teachers and fusty librarians.

Well, Bradbury is anything but boring — unless you think an infant murderer, a man at war with his own skeleton, or a dog that brings the dead to visit a bed-ridden boy sound like the ideas behind  boring stories. Those are just a few of the strange imaginings at work in The October Country, a classic collection of fantastical horror that collects much of Bradbury’s early work from magazines such as Weird Tales, and from a prior anthology Dark Carnival. It is a horror collection but, above all, it is a Bradbury collection, and his distinct voice permeates all and ensures that these tales are more about evoking a certain mood than dwelling on the horrific or sensational.  As to what that mood is, Bradbury says it best in his opening statement: The October Country is “that country where it is always turning late in the year, that country whose people are always autumn people, thinking autumn thoughts.”

The stories in this collection are palpably autumnal, and take place at the juncture of summer’s sweet recall and winter’s approach. Death is near, even in the midst of wonder, even in the celebration of life. ‘The Emissary,’ quoted at the opening of this review, is the perfect example of this. Rich in autumnal imagery, poetically October, it tells of the small pleasures of a sick and housebound boy, whose experience  of the world outside comes from the vicarious romping of his dog. An empathetic tale of a lonely child, one who still manages to find the joys in his childhood. But death is there, uncaring of the boy’s need, and intrudes on the boy’s life through his loyal and well-meaning emissary.

The stories in The October Country are both creepy and poignant, and highlight Bradbury’s strength of juxtaposing the mundane of everyday humanity with the weird and unexpected. Thus we have ‘The Crowd,’ a spooky tale based on the observation of how rapidly a crowd forms at the site of an accident, ‘The Small Assassin’ in which a new mother dislikes the baby she believes wants to kill her, and ‘The Jar,’ which gives us a man willing to kill to protect the only thing that gives him any significance — the mystery of the contents of a jar purchased from a carnival. There are horror tales here, like ‘The Wind’ and ‘Skeleton,’ but also tales of loss and fear and weird transformation.

‘Uncle Einar,’ the story of a winged man who can no longer soar on the night wind as he once did, and feels tethered to his earthly family, is a wonderful example of a tale that isn’t horrific in any way, yet fits as snugly alongside the stories in this collection as any other. Einar, brooding over his loss of vitality and the abandonment of his independence, comes to find salvation in the very family that he felt had tied him to the earth. In ‘The Dwarf,’ a small and misshapen man frequents a carnival in the slow hours of the night to see his reflection made tall and straight in the funhouse mirrors there. Two sets of very human reactions collide in his wake — his private fantasies inevitably the fodder for others because of his conspicuous vulnerability.

Bradbury handles language with his own distinctive rhythm, equal parts colloquial Americana and high poetry. His words pop off the page, crisp and unexpected and perfectly placed. This textual pyrotechnics is best seen in his short fiction — for which he is primarily known — and The October Country is perhaps one of his strongest collections in terms of linguistic and thematic richness. Bradbury’s language frolics, it frissons, it fulminates — it can make you bark laughter, blear eye, or drop jaw amazed and not a little bit awe-struck. Like all the best writing, it is akin to nothing else, the inhabiter of its own universe. It is a universe where readers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction can find a home — perhaps even in that part of it called The October Country.

• The October Country at Amazon
• Ray Bradbury’s website