Ray Bradbury - Reviews

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Greentown series, Book 2
Ray Bradbury
William Morrow (HarperCollins)
Fiction, MG? Fantasy/Horror
Themes: Classics, Country Tales, Demons, Sideshows
****

Description

In the graying October of a younger America, two small-town boys - Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade - are thrilled when they catch wind of a carnival coming to Greentown. Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark promise all manner of thrills and amusements, from the mystifying Mirror Maze to the horrifying collection of circus freaks. But from the night of the carnival's eerie arrival, darkness and shadows spread across the town. Will and Jim find the bonds of their friendship tested to the utmost as they face temptations and terrors that have bested Mankind since the dawn of human awareness.

Review

The Disney movie based on this book has long been a Halloween staple for me, but I'd never gotten around to reading it until now. Even though Bradbury wrote the screenplay for the movie, there are distinct differences. His prose runs thick with metaphors, giving the story's many dark images and moments of terror a nightmarish, semi-lucid quality. Through it all, a decent story and solid characters unfold. I found the writing a bit thick at times, making for slow reading, and memories of the movie lingered long past the point when the stories diverged, but overall it was a memorable book. I still think I liked the movie's version of events a little better, though.
Incidentally, though this is technically Book 2 in a series centered around Bradbury's fictional Greentown, it can be read as a standalone.
(I'm also not entirely certain on the age classification - in some ways, it's more of a grown-up book, childhood as viewed through a lens of nostalgia - but I know of people who read it as children, and I can see a certain kind of older child, one more aware and literate perhaps than some peers, appreciating it.)

The Halloween Tree

Ray Bradbury, illustratons by Gris Grimly
Yearling
Fiction, CH Chiller
Themes: Classics, Ghosts and Spirits, Time Travel
****

Description

In a small Midwestern town on Halloween, Tom Skelton and his friends can hardly wait to race into the autumn night, full of costumes and candy and spooks and shadows... but their best friend, Pipkin, hasn't joined them, asking instead that they meet him at the old house in the ravine past town. Here, the eight boys find a great, towering tree full of lit pumpkins: a real Halloween tree. And with it, they find the mysterious black-robed figure Mr. Moundshroud, who takes them on a wind-wild flight through history, down to the roots of all the fears and rituals that have become today's Halloween - all the while chasing a phantom of Pipkin, a soul dreadfully close to its final departure from Earth...

Review

With Bradbury's signature near-poetic prose and Grimly's borderline-surreal grayscale illustrations, The Halloween Tree is a holiday classic, an ode to the timeless spirit of boyhood as much as a celebration of Halloween. It's a story of wonder and of terror, stretching from ancient caves and Egyptian tombs to modern Mexican celebrations of the Day of the Dead. The story isn't so much a coherent arc with driving characters as it is a series of events they experience, a gauntlet of time and fear building up to a choice on which Pipkin's life ultimately depends, a choice to either cower from the ageless fear of Death or confront it. Some kids would likely be put off by Bradbury's prose, which can get a bit convoluted even to grown-ups, and others might find the subject matter unsettling, but it's much truer to the spirit of the holiday than so many modern interpretations, those bubble-wrapped cutesy commercial "specials" that file down the fangs of what is supposed to be a subtly unsettling night. Though the driftings of the boys almost grew tedious at times, and I could almost swear Bradbury was recycling a few turns of phrase and images from previous works, I still give it a solid Good rating.

The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury
HarperCollins
Fiction, Collection/Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens, Apocalypse, Epics, Classics, Space Stories
****

Description

A Martian woman's strange dreams provoke a strong reaction from her husband... An expedition to Mars inexplicably finds a small town from the 1950's American Midwest waiting at the landing site... A man has a strange encounter on a lonely road one long Martian night... An automated house patiently awaits the return of its masters... The story of humanity's exploration and conquest of Mars unfolds in this classic series of short stories and vignettes by noted sci-fi author Ray Bradbury.

Review

I've read a couple short stories from this classic collection over the years, but never the entire volume, so I figured it was worth a try when I found the eBook version at a discount. Bradbury's work pushes into poetry, riddled with ethereal descriptions of both ordinary and extraordinary things. Though characters rarely return, the whole collection works as a narrative, as well as an examination of two civilizations doomed by their own inescapable flaws. The Martians, already in their twilight, refuse to accept what the coming of Earth-men means until it's too late, while the young hot-blooded humans, fleeing their own collapsing planet, fail to realize that the seeds of their own self-destruction are within them all along. Moments of wonder and otherworldly beauty punctuate a slow-motion tragedy, with glimmers of hope all too often quashed by Martian denial and human ignorance. It's more allegory than hard science, a space-age mythos, in which the future Earth consists of hermetically-sealed 1950's white Midwestern American people, values, and lifestyles, and Mars is an especially exotic New World for Human Progress to destroy, plunder, and exploit. Men are independent scientists and explorers and doers, while women are needy and emotional tag-alongs. One wonders how much of this was a deliberate conceit on the part of Bradbury and how much was a result of cultural blinders of the era in which he wrote, the assumption that cultural norms (not to mention American dominance of space travel) would remain intact through interplanetary colonization. I have to admit some of those assumptions irked me - but such was the era in which Bradbury wrote these tales, and they weren't meant to be strict, hard SF speculation anyway, but more a mirror to explore and expose our own flaws - not to mention the likely outcome if those flaws remain unexamined and unchecked. On the whole, despite some elements of aging around the edges as the mid-century America he waxes poetic upon fades ever further into history, this collection becomes more than the mere sum of its stand-alone parts, still well worthy of its classic status.