Lockdown Choices - Issue #1: Dark Carnival

With the whole world in COVID-19 lockdown, and with it being the centenary year of Ray Bradbury, I toyed with the idea of starting a podcast to give Bradbury fans something to listen to. And then I started recording one, unscripted, and decided it might be too painful for human ears to listen to...

Instead, I thought, I could just get back into the habit of blogging regularly. Now, there's a novelty.

So welcome to the first in a new series of posts, my Lockdown Choices. In these posts, I will cover each of Ray Bradbury's books, say something about the contents, then pick the best stories: some will be chosen because they're damned good stories; and others will be chosen because they resulted in a damned fine adaptation.

(Note to self: there's going to be a Bradbury book which contains not a single adapted story. Deal with that issue when it arises.)

Lockdown Choice #1: Dark Carnival

First edition, Arkham House 1947.

The Book

Dark Carnival was Ray Bradbury's first book, a collection of dark fantasy tales published by the legendary Arkham House in 1947.  It collected twenty-seven stories, most of which had appeared earlier in Weird Tales magazine. There were also six previously unpublished stories. Any one of those "new" stories would have made the book worth buying.

It's worth pausing for a moment to reflect on Bradbury's success in Weird Tales. In 1943, when he was twenty-three years old, Bradbury appeared three times in that magazine. In 1944, five times. Three times in 1945 and 1946, and twice in 1947. That's a remarkable track record, in what was undoubtedly Bradbury's most prolific period.

The excited reader (of this blog) might at this point go running off to the interwebs to find where they can buy a copy of this wonderful book, which collects so much of Bradbury's early writing. But hold your horses. You'll need big money. First editions of Dark Carnival sell for upwards of $350, and the truncated UK edition published by Hamish Hamilton in 1948 isn't much cheaper.

Why should this be? Well, partly because it's an old book from a relatively minor publisher. But partly, too, because there never was a second edition. The Arkham edition, the UK edition, and that's it. Until fifty years later, when a limited edition came out - but more on that below.

It's not that Dark Carnival didn't sell enough for there to be any other editions. It's all down to Bradbury himself. He decided to re-write some of the stories; to refine the whole package; and his preferred versions of the stories came out in 1955 as The October Country. You can still get The October Country today, and it's never been out of print. But Dark Carnival was allowed by Bradbury to slip into relative obscurity.

Until 2001, that is, and the aforementioned limited edition. This came from Gauntlet Press, and came with Ray's blessing. Gauntlet also issued a CD of an interview with Ray, where he talked about some of the stories. But Ray was never interested in having any kind of mass-market reissue of Dark Carnival.

Find out how Dark Carnival became Bradbury's great "lost book" in my Bradbury 101 video below. And scroll further down the page for my pick of the best stories from the book.

 

The Stories

There's no question, some of Bradbury's finest stories are found in this collection. The acclaimed "Homecoming", which established Ray's "family". The much adapted and endlessly fascinating "The Jar". The much imitated but seldom bettered "The Small Assassin", in which a paranoid mother who thinks her baby is out to get her - turns out... to be right. And "The Next in Line", one of Ray's Mexican stories, set amid the mummy-filled catacombs of Guanajuato.

My personal picks from Dark Carnival are these:

"Skeleton" - part horrifying, part humorous, this is the story of a man who one day realises that inside him is... a skeleton. As with so many of the Dark Carnival stories, this is about paranoia. And as with "The Small Assassin" (and "The Wind" and "The Crowd") the paranoid central character is vindicated: there really is something out to get them. In the case of "Skeleton", it's the mysterious figure of M.Munigant, the bone specialist whose interest in bones is not quite what you might expect.

Bradbury said that this story was inspired by something that actually happened to him:

I went to my doctor with a sore throat, and I said, “Would you look in there? It feels kind of funny all around.”

He looked at my throat, and he says, “Oh, it’s a little red. It’s normal.” He says, “You know what you’re suffering from?”

And I said, “No. What?”

He says, “You’re suffering from a bad case of discovery of the
larynx.”

And I said, “What he’s saying, in other words…he’s saying it’s all normal.” And I went out of there feeling all of my bones.

And he said, “Well, you’ve got all kinds of bones in your body you’ve never noticed. Maybe you haven’t felt the medulla, or the bone on the end of your knee, here, the knee cap, that moves around if you get it in a certain position.”

From "Sum and Substance: With Ray Bradbury and Herman Harvey", 1962.
Quoted in Steven Aggelis, Conversations with Ray Bradbury.

"The Crowd" - one of Ray's finest compositions, in my humble opinion. It hinges on a character who becomes intrigued by the crowd that gathers around a car crash. Later, he witnesses another crash - and sees the same crowd. Not just the same type of crowd, but the exact same one - and: "There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn't put his finger on it." Investigating, he finds that this crowd has been around for a very, very long time. Eventually, our hero himself is in a car crash...

"The Crowd" is one of the stories which Bradbury revised for Dark Carnival, and the revised version is all the stronger for it. Jon Eller and Bill Touponce's book Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction reproduces a short passage of the revised version side-by-side with the original text, and you can see here how Ray adds a vivid metaphor of an explosion happening in reverse, coupled directly to Spallner, the centrally character. And note also how he italicises the last word of the last sentence in the passage, making so much difference to how we read both the sentence and the passage.

Excerpt from "The Crowd": original Weird Tales text (left) and revised Dark Carnival text (right). From Eller & Touponce, Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction (Kent State University Press, 2004, p.72).

"The Scythe" - I found this story both creepy and unnerving when I first read it in my teens, and it still packs a powerful wallop today. A family takes over a farm; the man goes out to cut the wheat; his family die. And he keeps on doing it. He is the grim reaper, if you like. Bradbury wrote this story during wartime (it was first published in July 1943), and in the view of Bradbury scholar Bill Touponce he "expands the traditional figure [the grim reaper] to include all the horrors of modern mechanised warfare".

Bradbury's friend Leigh Brackett - herself a successful writer of science fiction, fantasy and Hollywood screenplays (The Big Sleep, The Empire Strikes Back to name but two) - wrote the opening five hundred words of "The Scythe", apparently because Bradbury was struggling to provide the appropriate narrative frame for the story. But bear in mind that the story was revised by Bradbury for Dark Carnival, and so it is difficult in the currently-available version of the story to see the "join".


"The Lake" - my final pick from Dark Carnival is the story which Bradbury said really established him as a writer. In his own mind, that is. It's a really haunting story of a man who returns to a lake familiar from his childhood, where one of his closest friends lost her life. Now, after many years, her body washes ashore. It's frightening and heartbreaking, and I'll say no more about it. If you haven't read it yet: go! Read it now!

The Adaptations

For a book that is out of print, there is an astonishing amount of proven source material for media adaptation here. More than half of these stories (fourteen to be exact) were adapted by Bradbury himself for his TV series The Ray Bradbury Theater. Other adaptations appeared on TV in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the 1980s revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And on radio, multiple stories were turned into episodes of Bradbury Thirteen and the BBC series Tales of the Bizarre.

The clear winner in terms of number of adaptations is "The Jar". This one story has been dramatised at least four times, and it works both on TV and on radio. The concept is simple: a man acquires a jar from a carnival sideshow, and inside is... Well, no one can quite tell. The waters in the jar are somewhat murky. Clearly there's something in there, and it might even be moving around, but...

The best adaptation to date has to be the 1964 Hitchcock Hour version, adapted by James Bridges and directed by Norman Lloyd. In this one, the family in possession of the jar sit around it and stare - just as we can imagine the TV viewers of the time would have been doing when it first aired.

Find Out More...

Find out more about Dark Carnival on my page about the book, here.
Learn more about "The Jar" on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on my page about that show, here.

Listen...

The first of the Dark Carnival stories to be adapted to another medium was "The Crowd". Click here to listen to Suspense from 1950, with Dana Andrews in the lead role.

And if you really, really want to hear me in a podcast, you can find my guest appearances on other people's pods here!

Next Up...

The next of my Lockdown Choices will be Bradbury's second book: The Martian Chronicles.

Repairs complete!

Following the migration of Bradburymedia to a new web host, repairs are now complete!

There are probably still some broken links around the place - particularly links to other websites, which I haven't had time to systematically check - but everything should now be back to the way it was before the migration. If you spot anything that looks wrong, please post a comment below and I'll check it out.

In case you're wondering what else is here, other than the blog posts, here's a selection of pages which you may find interesting:

My review of the classic feature film It Came from Outer Space (original screen story by Ray Bradbury): http://www.bradburymedia.co.uk/films/it_came/it_came.htm

My review of episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (scripted by Bradbury and adapted from Bradbury stories): http://www.bradburymedia.co.uk/films/hitchcock/hitchcockhour.htm

My overview of the classic radio series Bradbury Thirteen (based on Bradbury stories): http://www.bradburymedia.co.uk/audio/bradbury13/bradbury13.htm

Thanks for your patience during the refurb - and check back soon for some new content! 

Fifty Years Ago Today: "The Jar"

It was fifty years ago today... one of the most popular Ray Bradbury adaptations was aired for the first time: "The Jar" on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Here's a full-page ad for that first broadcast. Click the image to enlarge.

I have blogged about "The Jar" several times before: click here to read more.

Juan Diaz

The marvellous bare.bones website has published another of Jack Seabrook's insightful reviews of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. This latest instalment is a detailed breakdown of the episode "The Life Word of Juan Diaz", which was scripted by Bradbury and based on his own short story. You can read Jack's review here. (My own review of the same episode is on my Alfred Hitchcock Hour page, here.)

Jack's other reviews of Bradbury/Hitchcock episodes are all worth reading. There are collected here.

Bradbury on TV

Jack Seabrook, author of Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric Brown (1993) and Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (2003) has begun reviewing Ray Bradbury's contributions to TV. His first article in this vein gives a detailed analysis of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "Shopping for Death", based on the Bradbury short story better known under the title "Touched With Fire". You can read the article on the excellent bare.bones blog.

My thanks to Jack for bringing his review to my attention. I look forward to seeing future instalments.

My own brief coverage of the Bradbury Hitchcock episodes can be found here; somehow I never quite got round to reviewing the half-hours in depth. I did a bit better with the Alfred Hitchcock Hour episodes, though, as you can see here.

Critical Judgement

Do you sometimes read a TV or film review and wonder whether the critic has been watching the same thing as you?

I had this (familiar) thought when I recently read a contemporary review of the 1964 Alfred Hitchcock Hour production of Bradbury's "The Jar". The review was written by critic Derek Malcolm in The Guardian (13 March 1964).

Malcolm is generally dismissive of the series as a whole, saying "by the end of the show one generally feels a little cheated".

Of "The Jar" in particular, he writes

The story, which may have been a good one as written by Ray Bradbury, collapsed in a sea of cliches about half way through and drowned without trace long before the end. It revolved around a simpleton who buys a mysterious bottle from a carnival sideshow [...] The jar, reckoned to hold the secret of life and death, is wrecked by his baby-doll wife, so he ups and puts her in another one to regale the natives even further. Mock not that ye be not mocked appeared to be the moral of the piece. But it needed better handling than it got to drive the point home past the numbing tedium which spread like glue across the screen.

[...] Even old stagers like Slim Pickens and Jane Darwell were unable to retrieve the situation for more than a couple of seconds. However, one has seen better Hitchcock Hours than this. But even the best look like Hitchcock at his most glib and facile, so there seems little point in connecting him with such goggle-box ephemera at all. Maybe he needs the money.

While the Hitchcock Hours were generally not as good as the half-hour format used in Alfred Hitchcock Presents - and while I would tend to agree with Malcolm that any artistic correlation between Alfred Hitchcock, film director, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour was somewhat tenuous - I can't help thinking that he has almost entirely missed the point of "The Jar". First, the show hinges on the visceral and visual fascination of the jar's mysterious contents, which drives people to do strange things. Second, the direction of the episode by Norman Lloyd is deliberately contrived to mirror the way people sit around the TV, entranced by its vague and flickering movements.

Perhaps Malcolm, being best known as a film critic, was unable to appreciate this as a particularly televisual production. Or perhaps this is a reading of the show which is more evident today than it would have been in 1964.

My own review of "The Jar" can be found here. I also have reviews of the Ray Bradbury Theatre version, and the weak 1980s Alfred Hitchcock Presents version.