So: here’s a story about how it took me 44 years to finally get a story collection.
Quick background for context. It is 1980. I was 16. By this time I’d spent a few years reading fantasy, horror and science fiction. I was still finding my way, though – I had read every Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke I could get my hands on, and in Fantasy read Tolkien, Ray Feist, David Eddings and some Stephen Donaldson, but that was about it.
But in my reading I kept hearing of the ‘Big Three’ (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke), or sometimes ‘the ABC group’ – that’s Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. And although I’d read the occasional Bradbury (I think my first story was “The Veldt”, in about 1975, but I’m not exactly sure) I’d not found many books by him, not even in my local library.
I had got a copy of The Martian Chronicles and didn’t like it. Unlike The Veldt with its wall-screen television, this wasn’t really ‘science fiction’ to my mind. Science fiction was logical, plausible, often an extrapolation of science fact. Some of this was most illogical. (Can you tell I liked Star Trek, too?) – (“What’s this? Picket fences on Mars? Rubbish!) – although I have reassessed that view in more recent years, and now have a signed copy – but even though I didn’t like it, I had seen the movie Fahrenheit 451, and watched the TV series of The Martian Chronicles, starring Rock Hudson (still very odd!), but that was about as close as I had got to Bradbury’s works.
Anyway, I eventually managed to get a copy of a Bradbury story collection from the second-hand book stall at my local market. It was a battered copy of The October Country, with an impressive skull and scythe on the cover. This might be different, I thought.
I eagerly got it home to read it. And… at first, I was still confused. This was definitely Fantasy. There were vampires and werewolves involved, not to mention killer babies, circuses, strange things in jars…. Some of it was clearly meant to be funny or at least mildly amusing. This was a bit of a revelation. Unlike Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, this stuff didn’t always take itself seriously. (Well, Asimov did occasionally attempt humour, with varying degrees of success, admittedly.)
I wasn’t sure I liked it.
This one was all about the words – startlingly direct at times, florid, poetical words at others. So I read it again – I didn’t have that many books at that stage. And mulled it over for a while.
But I kept coming back to The October Country. I found that I quite liked the nostalgic tone of yearning for a younger childhood, and I really liked the dark creepiness of stories such as The Jar (1944), The Wind (1943) and The Scythe (1943).
I later found that there were more stories like this in a book called Dark Carnival. Bradbury’s first story collection. In fact, one story in The October Country was from that collection – The Traveller.
Why wasn’t it in Dark Carnival? Indeed, where could I find a copy of Dark Carnival?
This was in the days pre-Internet, of course. I scoured second-hand bookshops for an elusive copy. The UK copy was a much shorter version of the US version – the US edition had 27 stories, the UK one, published in 1948, a mere 20 – with most of the other stories redistributed around his other collections, albeit often rewritten. Over time I read these as I could get them. But it wasn’t the same – the stories generally felt good, but a little diluted. I wanted a full-fat ‘proper’ copy. And even until now “The Night Sets”, “The Maiden”, “Reunion” and “Interim” have been hard to find.
Roll round to the early 2000’s and with the Internet I was able to take my search globally. Hurrah! Bad news, though – nothing really UK-available and the original US hardback, if you could find a copy, was hundreds of pounds even for one in poor condition – and even then beyond my budget.
I resigned myself to never having a copy. (Hardback Arkham copies are still out there for £400+, without dustjacket and in fairly poor condition, by the way.)
But then in 2023 Horror writer Ramsey Campbell let me know that there was to be a new UK edition – in paperback, admittedly, but with 27 stories, like the original US edition. The publication was then delayed, but earlier this year (March 2024) I finally got a copy. For less than £10.
So: what have we got here? As I said before, we have 27 stories, all dating from 1943 – 1947. “The Night Sets”, “The Maiden”, “Reunion” and “Interim” are now all included. These are Bradbury in his Weird Tales phase, with the stories mainly designed to creep and lurk. You want a thing in a jar from a circus freak-show? Try The Jar (1944). How about a child that’s possibly a killer, yet no one else can see it? Try The Small Assassin (1946), or the grisly and macabre The Man Upstairs (1947), one of the creepiest in the collection? How about when the same faces keep turning up to watch at accidents? Try The Crowd (1943). You know when you’ve had that feeling of being followed home but then there’s no-one there? Try The Night (1946). (I’m not going to mention too many stories here, as I think part of the fun of this collection is not knowing much about the stories in advance.)
To give elements of lighter mood, there is also the odd quirkily amusing nostalgia story thrown in too (The Homecoming, The Traveller, Uncle Einar.) With that in mind, I think that The Homecoming may not be the best start to the collection. As one of the so-called ‘Elliott family’ stories, it’s about a family of various horrors – vampires, ghosts, werewolves, etc. who all live together. It’s cute and made me think of Charles Addams’s The Addams family, which may be intentional (The Addams family were first published in 1937, The Homecoming first published in 1946.) But it is a light beginning to the collection – it’s only after that that the stories, on the whole, become darker and creepier.
Of the stories not published for a long while, The Maiden is short, odd and memorable, a story of decapitation by guillotine – and uses the word ‘orgasm’, which may have been the reason for its subsequent omission in later editions. The Night Sets I found to be better, as the short but atmospheric story of a ghost being fetched from a film set, Reunion is an addition to the Elliott stories and good humoured if perhaps a little unnecessary, and Interim is a short burst of a story straight out of Weird Tales, with its bodies rising from the dead and all. In summary, they are worth a read but I can see why they were omitted for years. They are relatively minor works.
As these stories were published originally in the 1940’s it must be said that there are elements that may not sit well with a modern audience – references to ‘Negroes’ are a little jarring, but they are written with some respect for their time. The so-called Mexican stories (such as the novella-length The Last in Line (1947) in this book) could also be seen as rather racist today also, but I guess at the time they highlighted cultures that were less well known to most Americans. Remember at this time the main readership of pulp magazines were white WASP males, although there were always exceptions.
Admittedly Bradbury may have written better work, more complex stories more poetical, more heartfelt stories than these in his later years – this was his first story collection, after all. And yet cumulatively they create a sense of unease, of creepiness, all written up in vivid language – think Hitchcock movies in prose – anyone who’s ever read some of Alfred Hitchcock story collections will get the idea. (And in fact, Bradbury did have four of these stories in those collections.) They are of a lost world, a time when settlements were often small, neighbourhoods and neighbours were important, and mobile phones were a science fiction dream.
Admittedly, even I will admit that some stories that work less well than others – I found that some of the comedic elements of stories such as ‘The Dead Man’ (1945) have dated, although this particular story turns itself into something less mean by the end. But this is a collection about the breadth rather than the depth, after all. Things were simpler then, I guess.
The biggest downside, if there is one, is that some of the stories may seem obvious or familiar, having being copied by others so often since. I must also say that some of them do show an author still finding his voice, although I am still amazed that Bradbury wrote these when he was only somewhere between 23 and 27 years old.
On a minor point, whilst I think that the original Arkham House cover was bad (Bradbury allegedly hated it himself!) and the 1948 UK cover by Hamish Hamilton just as bad, I think that the new cover does the book no favours at all – simplistic, cheap-looking, the sort of thing that looks like it was made up in 10 minutes on Photoshop. It may not necessarily attract people to pick the book up, which is a real shame. (“It’s a circus book!”)
However, if we concentrate upon the prose, if you want to see why Bradbury was so well regarded in the 1940’s, then this collection is a must. Whilst Fahrenheit 451 (published 1953) and Something Wicked The Way Comes (published 1962) show more complexity and depth, Dark Carnival shows Bradbury’s range as an author of stories. Full of ideas, funny (both in humorous sense as well as odd), eerie, nostalgic and yes – weird, they encapsulate Bradbury’s early strengths in short form – brief but memorable, poetic and creepy, even gleefully gory. I will keep coming back to reread these in this particular collection. I would recommend that you don’t read this collection all at once, but take your time to work through it for the stories to have their fullest impact. It’s worth it- after all, It’s only taken me 44 years, but I’ve finally got what I wanted. The wait was worthwhile!
Dark Carnival by Ray Bradbury
Originally published (US) 1948
This edition March 2024 by HarperVoyager
480 pages
ISBN: 978 000 8554 316
