Bradbury 101 - Bradbury's Lost Book

Dark Carnival is something of a lost book. It was Bradbury's first book, published way back in 1947, but allowed - by Bradbury - to go out of print.

In the latest episode of my YouTube series Bradbury 101, I pick some of the best stories from Dark Carnival and explain why and how it became a lost masterpiece.

You can read more about Dark Carnival in my Lockdown Choices series, here. And learn more about the book it evolved into - The October Country - here.

I've also blogged about The Small Assassin, a UK-only book which is something of a bridge between Dark Carnival and The October Country. Read all about it here.

I hope you are enjoying the Youtube series. After you've watched the latest episode, let me know what you think!

Lockdown Choices: Something Wicked This Way Comes

This is another in my series of Lockdown Choices, where I seek to entertain you while in coronavirus-isolation, and remind you of Ray Bradbury's great works in this, his centenary year.

In these posts, I cover each of Bradbury's books, say something about the contents, then pick the best stories and adaptations.

Lockdown Choices: Something Wicked This Way Comes

First edition, Simon & Schuster 1962. Cover art by Gray Foy.

The Book

Something Wicked is Ray Bradbury's twelfth(ish) book, depending how you count them. At this point, I've more or less given up! It is - definitely - his first true novel. What do I mean by that? Well, The Martian Chronicles looks something like a novel, but it's really a collection of previously-published short stories, stitched together into a new patchwork. Fahrenheit 451 is barely long enough to count as a novel (it's more of a novella), and in any case is an expansion of a previously published short story, "The Fireman". And Dandelion Wine also looks something like a novel, but is really another collection of previously-published short stories, stitched together into a new patchwork.

And that leaves us with the present volume, the definitely, no question about it, never before published original novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. 

Except... It's not an original work... Now, before you start screaming, let me explain: this novel has its origins in a previously-published short story, "The Black Ferris" (1948). Bradbury used this short story as the springboard for an expanded work called The Dark Carnival.

"Dark Carnival? Yeah, I've heard of that. Bradbury's first book, long out of print."

Er, no. THE Dark Carnival, a film script Bradbury wrote for Gene Kelly in the 1950s. A film script which Kelly was unable to get studio support for, and which was therefore abandoned, never to be filmed. Leading Bradbury to re-write it as the novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes. Something Wicked, therefore, is a novelisation of a film script!

"The Black Ferris" is a fast-moving short story whose location is barely dwelt upon, but passing references to a lake, a ravine and a boarding house clearly place this story in the familiar Bradbury universe. It’s not explicitly named as Green Town, Illinois, but it’s clearly the same place. It's about two boys who sneak out to a fairground, and accidentally witness some strange shenanigans: a man climbs aboard a ferris wheel, runs it backwards, and gets off - but when he gets off, he's a small child. The child runs into town, commits a crime, then returns to age himself once again on the ferris wheel. The story is pure fantasy, of course, but with a great central gimmick.

Mr Cooger, after the ferris wheel runs out of control. Illustration for "The Black Ferris", Weird Tales, May 1948.

By the time Ray got round to developing this story into something longer, he had settled on a carousel for the ageing/de-ageing device. I have a pet theory on how this happened: a ferris wheel has no obvious sense of going forwards or backwards. A carousel, on the other hand, has horses to indicate the direction of spin; if you see a carousel going backwards, you know something is awry.

British first edition of Something Wicked. Hart-Davis, 1963. Cover art by Joe Mugnaini.

"The Black Ferris" gives us one incident that would later be expanded in Something Wicked. But all the other elements and characters come from that screenplay I mentioned, which Bradbury drafted between 1955 and 1959. This contains most of the plot and characters that you find in the novel, although there are some key differences. The principal one is that the character we know as Mr Halloway in the novel is actually a merger of two characters from the screenplay (one is a father, the other a library janitor). It was fairly late in the drafting of the novel that Bradbury hit upon the idea of merging them into one. Other differences include the character names - Peter and Hank, rather than Jim and Will, for example. This reveals the connection to "The Black Ferris", whose twin protagonists are also Pete and Hank. Oh, and Mr Dark - such an important and iconic figure of evil in the novel - is unnamed and rarely seen in the screenplay. He was something of an afterthought, and only really developed as Bradbury converted his screenplay into a novel.

That 1950s screenplay has been published, albeit in a limited edition, Dawn to Dusk: Cautionary Travels (Gauntlet Press, 2011). There you will see it presented as "a screen treatment", although it is sufficiently long and detailed as to really be a full, first draft screenplay. "First draft" really needs to be emphasised, since this version of the story is somewhat unstructured. It has some beautiful scenes which would carry over into the novel virtually unchanged, but the story logic that gets us from scene to scene is sometimes lacking. This isn't a criticism, it's just a fact of life with first draft scripts. In all my study of Bradbury's screenwriting over the years, I've seen very little evidence of Ray starting out with a structured outline. On the contrary, all the evidence points to him just sitting at the keyboard and typing whatever came into his head, exactly the process he recommended for writing short stories. The structure would come later, as he found it within the first draft, and worked to shape it and strengthen it in later drafts.

Dawn to Dusk, Gauntlet 2011. Edited by Bradbury's bibliographer Donn Albright, this limited edition contains one of Bradbury's 1950s screenplay drafts for The Dark Carnival, the basis for the 1962 novel Something Wicked. The wraparound cover art reproduces a Joe Mugnaini painting.

Once Bradbury was sure that the screenplay wasn't going to be filmed, he set about novelising it. In the various stages of his process, he experimented with point of view. One draft of the novel was written in the first person, from the viewpoint of Will Halloway. The working title at this stage became Jamie and Me. Finally, Bradbury switched back to third person narration as he finalised the novel into the form we know it today, and eventually settled on the Shakespearean title Something Wicked This Way Comes. If you've ever wondered why the book seems to spend a bit more time with Will and his thoughts (rather than Jim and his thoughts), it's probably because Will was the narrator during those earlier stages.
 

The Stories

In this section I usually write about individual stories making up a collection, but in the case of a novel that doesn't really work. Instead, as I did with Fahrenheit 451, I'll write about the best scenes in the book.


Mr Cooger becomes a child - the scene developed directly from "The Black Ferris". For all of the effectiveness and economy of "The Black Ferris", the developed version of the scene in the novel approaches perfection. Remember that here Bradbury needs to establish the logic of how this familiar-yet-strange machine works. It has to support not just a single episode in a short story, but the whole weight of the novel - since the carousel turns out to be critical to the novel's denouement. Heavily condensed, here is how Bradbury does it (in chapter 18):

          With a pop, a bang, a jangle of reins, a lift and a downfall, a rise and descent of brass, the carousel moved.
          [...] The merry-go-round was running, yes, but . . .
          It was running backward.
          [...] Jim nodded frantically at the man in the machine as he came around the next time.
          Mr. Cooger's face was melting like pink wax.
          His hands were becoming doll's hands.
          [...] The small shape stepped down from the silent world, its face in shadow, but its hands, newborn wrinkled pink, held out in raw carnival lamplight.

From this, you get the mechanism, you get the effect, you get a developing evil. And, carefully controlled on the page through the use of short paragraphs, you get a very clear visual picture of the whole sequence. Bradbury the novelist is here Bradbury the screenwriter, giving us very clear shots and camera angles.



Hiding in the drains - there comes a point (chapter 35) when Will and Jim are on the run from the evil carnival. They hide in a storm drain, and have to suffer in silence as they witness the evil Mr Dark verbally sparring with Mr Halloway, directly above them. This scene comes directly from Bradbury's earliest screenplay drafts, and it plays out the same way there as it does in the novel. Once Bradbury has a good, strong scene, he knows it, and will hone it to perfection, as he has done here.

          The cloudy sun poured light through all the sky.
          The two boys, boxed in light-slotted pit, hisstled their breath softly out through gritted teeth.
          [Will] gazed up . . . Dad looked even smaller up there than he had last night.
          [...] "Sir," said the man named Dark, probing Charles Halloway's face [...], "the Cooger-Dark Combined Shows have picked two local boys, two! to be our special guests during our celebratory visit!"
          [...]"Two selected from photos snapped on our midway yesterday. Identify them, sir, and you will share their fortune. There are the boys.
          He sees us down here! thought Will. Oh, God!

Again, Bradbury beautifully controls the "camera" through which we witness events. We shift seamlessly from down below with the boys, to up above with the two men, and back again. By having one scene play out, witnessed from below, he is able to rack up the Hitchcockian suspense of the scene. It's no surprise that this scene turns up almost unchanged in the 1983 feature film which was eventually made of Something Wicked (see below).


In the library - Mr Dark tracks down the boys to the library, but first encounters Mr Halloway again. Dark is amused to find that Halloway has been researching Cooger & Dark's carnival, and mocks Halloway's confidence that a Bible will protect him. "How childish and refreshingly old fashioned," Dark says as he proceeds to riffle the pages of the holy book, blowing smoke on the pages as he does so.

Shortly thereafter, Dark hunts the boys among the library shelves. They are terrified in amongst the books, but Dark quietly, patiently, climbs the shelves until:

          The eyes of the Illustrated Man came abreast of the eleventh shelf.
          Like a corpse laid rigid out, face down just three inches away, was Jim Nightshade.
          One shelf further up in the catacomb, eyes trembling with tears, lay William Halloway.
          "Well," said Mr. Dark.
          He reached a hand to pat Will's head.

The Adaptations

You're probably aware of the 1983 Disney film based on the novel, which has a screenplay credited to Ray Bradbury himself. But there had been a series of earlier attempts to get the novel on the screen - even after Ray had given up his 1950s efforts with Gene Kelly.

In the 1970s, Bradbury teamed with the legendary Sam Peckinpah, and created quite the most literal screenplay adaptation of a novel I've ever seen. Perhaps influenced by Peckinpah's claim that he could film the novel just by ripping the pages out of the book and stuffing them into the camera, Bradbury's 1974 script is a scene-by-scene transposition of the entire novel into screenplay form. It runs to 262 pages, which would lead to a running time of around four-and-a-half hours if filmed. Actually, it's a little unfair to call it just a transposition, because it does introduce some small new elements, and it is a very well written script. But it's a bit naive to think that converting every scene into screenplay format will produce a well balanced film.

A couple of years later, Bradbury wrote another screenplay based on Something Wicked. This wasn't a simple condensation of the 1974 script, but a completely new attempt. Finished in 1976, this version was to have been directed by Jack Clayton, for Paramount. Clayton and Bradbury had met in England back in the 1950s, when Bradbury was working on the screenplay for Moby Dick. They had a lot of common interests, and maintained a long-running correspondence for years, always hoping that at some point they would work together on a film. In 1976, it looked as if Something Wicked would be it. Unfortunately, the project fell apart as film projects often do - changes at the top of the studio, that sort of thing.

Finally, around 1981, the film was back on, this time at Disney. Bradbury's script was revised, and they were ready to go. Unfortunately, Clayton also got one of his writer friends (John Mortimer, of Rumpole of the Bailey fame) to give the script a little polish. And omitted to tell Bradbury. It was only when they were facing each other in a script meeting that Bradbury discovered Clayton's working draft was different. This put something of a chasm between Bradbury and Clayton, causing Bradbury to continue to work through gritted teeth all the time that he was talking to the press about the film.

The magnificent Jonathan Pryce as Mr Dark leads the parade in the 1983 Disney film.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Bradbury was generally happy for directors and other writers to make changes to his work. He was occasionally delighted when this happened (as with Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, which has some major points of departure from the novel it is based on), and occasionally disappointed (as with Jack Smight's abysmal The Illustrated Man).

But in the case of Something Wicked, the contractually official title was Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Bradbury was the sole credited screenwriter. To turn up to work and find you had been re-written, behind your back, by a director you considered to be a friend... beggars belief. But it's all too common in Hollywood.

When the completed film was screened to a preview audience, it was considered a disaster. Chances are, it was the wrong audience for the film. This is another thing that's all too common in Hollywood: relying on the judgment of an audience who typically haven't even paid to see the film. (Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons is the classic example of a studio going into a panic after a bad screening.)

But the poor preview screening gave Bradbury an opportunity to take back control. He made strong suggestions for re-editing and partially re-shooting the film, and some of these suggestions did shape the film's re-making. The autumnal scenes that open and close the film were Bradbury's suggestion, as is the voice-over narration (spoken by Arthur Hill), which brings an authorial tone close to what we find in the book.

In later life, Bradbury would go so far as to claim that he had directed the film during this re-make period, but this is a gross overstatement. While he was influential over some of the narrative re-structuring, my own study of the studio memos and call sheets (in the Bradbury papers held by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies in Indianapolis) shows that the real directorial control was in the hands of the Disney special effects department. Clayton was present throughout the re-shoots, and Bradbury made himself as available as he could, but both of them were largely sidelined as the technical team worked to knock the film into shape for release. Most of the changes made were to effects-based sequences, and some non-effects sequences were enhanced by having visual effects added. An example of the latter is the subtle addition of flames as Mr Dark rips pages from a book in the library sequence - and this is an enhancement that really works, making a dramatically powerful scene even stronger.

Sadly, the whole affair broke the friendship of Bradbury and Clayton. While they together stood firm against some aspects of the Disney "machine", once it was over they never spoke again.

While there has been talk of a new film version of Something Wicked, there is still no sign of one at the time of writing. But there have been adaptations for other media. Bradbury wrote a stage play based on his novel, some time in the 1990s. It is available for purchase from Dramatic Publishing. It's a fairly direct adaptation, and (judging by a performance I saw about ten years ago) in some places a little awkward it its use of the stage. But the key scenes that work in the novel also work well in the play.

That same play script was used for the Colonial Theatre radio play production in 2007. This production, inevitably stripped of the constraints of the stage, arguably works better than a conventional theatre production, leaving the listener's imagination to fill in the scenery.

Colonial Radio Theatre used Ray Bradbury's theatrical play as the script for their full-cast audio dramatisation. Only the smallest adjustments had to be made to the script.

BBC Radio also made their own full-cast audio production back in 2011, but using an original script by Diana Griffiths. I don't think this was ever commercially released, but it has been given a repeat airing a couple of time.

And even "The Black Ferris", the short story which started it all, was adapted for The Ray Bradbury Theatre. The 1990 episode was scripted by Bradbury himself, and directed in New Zealand by Roger Tompkins.

Find Out More...

Read my review of the Colonial Theatre radio production of Something Wicked, here.

Learn who else might have directed Something Wicked if history had played out differently, in my blog post here.

British novelist Kingsley Amis was a leading proponent of science fiction, but didn't get on so well with fantasy. Read about his scathing review of Something Wicked, in my blog post here.

See...

Bradbury adapted "The Black Ferris" for his TV series, The Ray Bradbury Theater. You can watch this prototype for Something Wicked here.

In 2011, artist Ron Wimberley created a graphic novel adaptation of the Bradbury book. You can see a preview of some of the pages here.

Next Up...

The next of my Lockdown Choices will be the restrospective re-mix collection, R is for Rocket.

From Dark Carnival to The Small Assassin...

You'd be forgiven for getting confused over the apparently endless re-shuffling of stories between Ray Bradbury's early collections. I know I am.

To clear my own mind, I created this table which shows the six basic editions of Dark Carnival, The October Country and The Small Assassin.

To get some insight into why this re-shuffling came about, read my "Lockdown posts" on those three books. But, in brief, it was a combination of editor preference for each edition, combined with Bradbury opportunistically tweaking his table of contents each time a new edition was in preparation.

Bradbury once wrote something to the effect that he didn't believe in re-writing his younger self, and that he let his books stand as originally written. Please don't believe him. It's just not true. Ray was an inveterate re-writer and table-of-contents-tweaker!

The table below puts the various stories in alphabetical order. And it probably has some errors, although I've double-checked it eight times over... Click on the table to make it bigger.

The Dark Carnival/October Country/Small Assassin re-shuffle. Click to embiggen.

Lockdown Choices - Issue #7: The October Country

This is the seventh in a new series of posts, my Lockdown Choices, where I seek to entertain you while in coronavirus-isolation, and remind you of Bradbury's great works in this, his centenary year.
In these posts, I cover each of Ray Bradbury's books, say something about the contents, then pick the best stories and adaptations.

Lockdown Choice #7: The October Country

First edition, Ballantine 1955. Cover art by Joe Mugnaini. Note the pseudo-gothic houses, the implied wind... and the inexplicable lizard creature...

The Book

The October Country was Ray Bradbury's seventh book, published by Ballantine in (appropriately enough) October of 1955. It contained nineteen stories, fifteen of them reprinted from his earlier book  Dark Carnival (1947). In fact, the project originated as a simple re-packaging and re-arrangement of Dark Carnival, once Arkham house had relinquished rights to the book. It was Bradbury's Ballantine editor Stanley Kaufmann who realised the revised contents of the book were drifting a long way from the original, and suggested a new title would be in order (see Eller & Touponce, Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction, pp. 77-79).

This was the first of many re-shuffled playlists of Bradbury's short-story-collection career, and so it's worth just spelling out how it compares to Dark Carnival:

The stories in black are carried over, and the ones in red are new to The October Country. Also new is the "the" in front of "Cistern", perhaps stolen from "The Homecoming", which no longer has a "the"!

And missing from the original Dark Carnival line-up are: "The Maiden", "The Tombstone", "The Smiling People", "The Traveler", "Reunion", "The Handler", "The Coffin", "Interim", "Let's Play Poison", "The Night", "The Dead Man", and "The Night Sets". But most of these would re-surface in future collections, so Bradbury was presumably still happy with them. (Four of them would never re-appear in a Bradbury collection, though: "The Maiden", "Reunion", "Interim", and "The Night Sets". My thanks to Piet Nel for pointing this out.)

As with his earlier book The Ilustrated Man, Bradbury initially considered something of a framing narrative to tie the disparate short stories together, but went instead for a two-page scene presenting a dialogue between a grandfather and grandson. He later trimmed this down to his simple "definition" of the concept as it appears in the finished book:

...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain...

This passage reminds me very much of an introduction to a TV anthology series, and it's surprising in a way that nobody ever developed such a concept from the book - especially since The October Country contains some of Bradbury's most frequently-adapted stories.

Mugnaini illustration for "Skeleton", helping to define the story before the reader even begins to read. Note the man's shadow...

As with another earlier book The Golden Apples of the Sun, Bradbury wanted to include illustrations by Joe Mugnaini, and so some (but not all of the stories) appeared with Mugnaini's by now familiar line drawings. In Golden Apples, the drawings were half-page images at the head of each story, and became inextricably linked to the story for the reader. In The October Country, however, the illustrations were allowed a full page each, sometimes before the story, and sometimes within the story; almost randomly distributed, and with some stories remaining completely unillustrated.

Mugnaini illustration for "The Scythe", planted within the story.

 

 

 

The October Country picked up some good reviews. The UK edition won approval from The Guardian reviewer Norman Shrapnel, who declared that Bradbury's stories had "the subtlety of a hypodermic syringe". (I'm still trying to figure out whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.) Meanwhile another British reviewer for The Observer lamented that Bradbury had been "classed with the science fiction writers". Because, you know, he was good, unlike those sci-fi fellows...

Mugnaini illustration for "The Wind", again preceding the story. Note the echo of the tree shown on the book's cover.

I made a Bradbury 101 video about The October Country, in which I give an overview of how Dark Carnival was re-worked, demonstrating that part of Bradbury's method was his tendency to re-write:

 

   

 

The Stories

When I covered Dark Carnival, I singled out a few stories which re-appear here - namely "Skeleton", "The Crowd", "The Scythe", "The Lake". So here I will pick just from those which are new to The October Country.


"The Dwarf" - this was one of my early favourite Bradbury stories, The October Country being only the second Bradbury book I ever read. The story is simultaneously funny, sad and frightening. The basic premise is about a little man (the dwarf of the title) who goes into a hall of mirrors to see himself distorted to full stature. It's not exactly politically correct when stated like that, and in truth the story might find difficulty getting published today. But what makes the story so terrific is that the dwarf is also a writer who has written a story about being both a dwarf and a murderer; and he is effectively tortured by the main characters in the story. I'm not doing it justice here - you really need to read it. But it's an effective series of twists and distortions, and through Bradbury's skill you will by turns be horrified by the dwarf and feel sorry for him.


"Touched with Fire" - this story has a simple premise: "More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than at any other temperature." Any warmer, and it's too hot to move; any cooler, and cooler heads prevail. What makes this story so charming is the way it's framed. The main action involves the hotheaded Mrs Shrike:

The woman [...] stood at a wall phone, saliva flying from her mouth at an incredible rate. She showed off all of her large white teeth, chunking off her monologue, nostrils flared, a vein in her wet forehead ridged up, pumping, her free hand flexing and unflexing itself. Her eyes were clenched shut as she yelled [...]

But the story is told through the frame of Mr Foxe and Mr Shaw, who set out to verify the hypothesis of 92-degree murders. They have targeted Mrs Shrike as she seems a likely murderer...

"Touched with Fire" originally appeared in Maclean's magazine as "Shopping for Death" in June 1954. Bruce Johnson's illustration masterfully captures the key scenes from the story, and with an effective colour scheme for Mrs Shrike.

I decided when I started this series of blog posts that I would talk about my favourite stories. And of the four new stories in this volume, these are the only two that I could count as favourites. There are some elements of "Dudley Stone" which impress me, but overall I have little time for that story. And I'm afraid "The Watchful Poker Chip" remains one of my least favourite Bradbury stories. So I'll say no more about them.

The Adaptations

The October Country, being just a collection of short stories with no linking narrative, doesn't lend itself to being adapted as a whole book. But it has been done - as radio drama - twice. Sort of.

ABC Radio's Halloween 1984: The October Country was a ninety-minute live broadcast from the Directors' Guild Theater in Los Angeles, performed before an audience. It wove together four of the book's stories ("Emissary", "There Was An Old Woman", "The Next in Line" and "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone") into a, er, strange assemblage. Most of the individual stories were told reasonably well, and with a decent cast which included June Lockhart, Lynn Redgrave, and voice-acting legends Casey Kasem and Gary Owens. But "The Next in Line" - set by Bradbury in the Mexican town of Guanajuato, famous for its mummies and catacombs - is inexplicably relocated to Jamaica. And "Dudley Stone" for some reason becomes the author of all these stories, as the production makes "solving the mystery of Dudley Stone" into the overarching plot of the whole thing. I feel sorry for Bradbury, who had to sit in the audience through this whole production, and was then hurried into an unplanned interview when the show ran short. Bradbury explains the origin of each of the stories, politely pointing out that "The Next in Line" was based on a real experience he had in Mexico, not Jamaica...

In 2009, Peggy Webber's California Artists Radio Theatre did a better job, with a cast including Beverley Garland and William Windom. No framing or linking story, just a single ninety-minute production which tackled several of the best stories from the book: "Skeleton", "There Was an Old Woman" (again), "Uncle Einar", and "The Man Upstairs". The adaptation here was straightforward, with the narration of the stories turned directly into voice narration, and the dialogue brought to life by performers and sound effects.

Better work was done on adapting individual stories from The October Country. "The Dwarf" turned up on The Ray Bradbury Theater, in an episode which Ray considered to be one of the worst, but that was one of the few week adaptations of October Country stories. "The Next in Line" has been done well for radio on several occasions, perhaps the best being Brian Sibley's Tales of the Bizarre adaptation for the BBC. And then there is a whole string of stories which, in adaptational terms, are among Bradbury's star turns, all of them having been adapted multiple times: "Skeleton", "The Jar", "The Lake", "Emissary", "Touched With Fire", "The Small Assassin", "The Crowd".

Find Out More...

You can read "Touched with Fire" (in its original magazine form "Shopping for Death") at the Maclean's archive, here.

Watch...

Watch part of Ray's own 1956 TV adaptation of "Touched with Fire" ("Shopping for Death") for Alfred Hitchcock Presents here.

Listen...

Listen to ABC Radio's Halloween 1984: The October Country, here.

Better still, listen to how "The Next in Line" should be done, in Brian Sibley's dramatisation for BBC Radio's Tales of the Bizarre, here.

Next Up...

The next of my Lockdown Choices will be Bradbury's eighth book: Dandelion Wine.

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.

Bradbury News

Earlier this week, The Guardian reported that Ray Bradbury's books are finally to be released as e-books in the UK. No big deal, you might think - except that Bradbury was famously opposed to his works being made available in this form right up until his final year on this planet. I don't believe there was any great earth-shattering moment when he "caved in", or when he had some great epiphany; I think it was just a case of the new contract arriving, and the continued publication of the print editions of his works would be conditional on e-book rights also being made available to his publisher.

The Guardian faithfully reported this story, but slipped in a new piece of information which to me is much more significant. It appears that Dark Carnival is among the books which will be made available as an e-book.

Dark Carnival. Bradbury's first book. Not science fiction, but dark fantasy and horror. The book that he refused to be re-issued, on the grounds that he had re-written (improved?) all of its constituent short stories, which continued to be available in the collection The October Country.

Dark Carnival has only ever been available in three editions: the US hardcover, out of print since the 1940s; the UK hardcover, also out of print since that decade; and a limited edition re-issue from Gauntlett Press (2001), also long out of print.

At the moment, any copy of Dark Carnival is likely to set you back at least £600 (900 USD). The first edition typically goes for 2000USD.

So issuing Dark Carnival as an e-book is a very big deal. (Assuming, of course, that they use the original text from Dark Carnival. If they instead cobble the contents together from the text in The October Country, thinking that the stories are identical, they will be making a big mistake.)

Is there much of a difference between the stories in Dark Carnival and the re-written versions in The October Country? In some cases, not so much. But in other cases the stories are somewhat transformed. In general, the earlier versions of the stories are darker and a bit more raw; the re-writes are a bit more poetic, but sometimes read like a more "respectable" Bradbury has gone back and tidied up the work of his earlier self. This isn't far from what actually happened, as Dark Carnival came out when Bradbury was known only from stories in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, but The October Country was assembled when he had gone up in the world and was appearing in slick, upmarket magazines.



Speaking of Dark Carnival, BBC Radio 4 Extra this week broadcast a dramatisation of one of the stories from that book. "The Emissary" is a thirty-minute drama broadcast in the Haunted strand. Although marked on the BBC website as a "Radio 4 Extra debut", the closing credits of the show place it as a BBC World Service production, so it is probably not new... but I haven't been able to work out when it was made. Oddly, the late Percy Edwards is credited with playing the dog in the story, but he died a long time ago. Either it's a much older recording than it appears, or Percy is being played in as a sound effect!

"The Emissary" is still available right now for listening online, but it won't stay there forever. Get it while you can.

Death, Maidens

Ray Bradbury has on more than occasion written about old ladies and their encounters with death. Sometimes he does it with humour, and sometimes with a serious tone. But always it is with a strong old lady, who is able to confront death and sometimes tell it who's boss.

A serious but quirky treatment is given in "Good-by Grandma", a short story first published in the Saturday Evening Post on 25 May 1957, and shortly afterwards incorporated into the novel Dandelion Wine. The Post version of the story was accompanied by Peter Stevens' paintings of the magnificently active grandmother (left).

This old lady passes away when she wants to. Bradbury treats her death not so much as an end as a return, a picking up of a thread:

A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much, when someone wakened me, and that was the day when I was born. And now? Now, let me see. She cast her mind back. Where was I? she thought.

In the earlier short story "There Was An Old Woman", first published in Weird Tales in July 1944, Bradbury gives us an old lady who resists death with all her might. It's not so much that she is scared of it; more a case of not having time for such nonsense:

"Why, it's just silly that people live a couple years and then are dropped like a wet seed in a hole and nothing sprouts but a smell. What good do they do that way? They lay there a million years, doing no good for nobody. Most of 'em fine, nice and neat people, or at least trying."

This story was illustrated by Boris Dolgov, who shows death as a cowed skeleton, chased off by Aunt Tildy. The story was collected in Bradbury's books Dark Carnival, The October Country and The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Bradbury also adapted it for The Ray Bradbury Theater.

A third classic Bradbury meeting between death and an old lady is "Death and the Maiden", which first appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction in March 1960, and later collected in The Machineries of Joy and Bradbury Stories.

This old lady, the 91-year-old Mam, is a bit like Aunt Tildy in her opposition to death:

“I see you. Death.” would cry Old Mam. “In the shape of a scissors-grinder! But the door is triple-locked and double-barred. I got flypaper on the cracks, tape on the keyholes, dust mops up the chimney, cobwebs in the shutters, and the electricity cut off so you can’t slide in with the juice! No telephones so you can call me to my doom at three in the dark morning. And I got my ears stuffed with cotton so I can’t hear your reply to what I say now. So, Death, get away!”

 But this time death is more subtle. It comes not as a skeleton but as a handsome young man, who brings Mam the promise of re-experiencing the freedom she hasn't allowed herself since the age of eighteen. She finally comes to believe in the man, and accepts the trade he offers. After years of living alone, locked away from the world and the risk of death, Old Mam steps out:

And they ran down the path out of sight, leaving dust on the air and leaving the front door of the house wide and the shutters open and the windows up so the light of the sun could flash in with the birds come to build nests, raise families, and so petals of lovely summer flowers could blow like bridal showers through the long halls in a carpet and into the rooms and over the empty-but-waiting bed. And summer, with the breeze, changed the air in all the great spaces of the house so it smelled like the Beginning or the first hour after the Beginning, when the world was new and nothing would ever change and no one would ever grow old.

Bradbury took the title of this story from an old legend, one which has inspired generations of artists. Read about the history of "death and the maiden" here.

That Was October...

Of all months, October is the one most associated with Ray Bradbury. He wrote The October Country and The Halloween Tree, and set Something Wicked This Way Comes in the month of October. As a consequence, there are more references to Bradbury on the web at this time of year than at any other time. Now it's over(!), here's a few notable pieces which appeared recently:

Claire Thompson uses The Halloween Tree as a way into a fascinating discussion of how Americans (and, presumably, the rest of us) can evaluate their neighbourhoods. With its discussion of trick-or-treating and "walkability", it taps into more than one of Bradbury's recurring concerns.

The blog Too Much Horror Fiction gives a detailed appreciation of both Dark Carnival and The October 
 Country, with some good illustrations

The Lake County Sun-Times has a photo-gallery report on this year's Waukegan Ray Bradbury Storytelling Festival.

Bradbury's British Debut

Sixty-two years and one month ago the British Guardian newspaper carried its first review of a writer's first book. The book was Dark Carnival by Ray Bradbury, in its British edition from Hamish Hamilton publishers - which was slightly different from the US Arkham House edition.

Here, in its entirety, is what reviewer Charles Marriott had to say of young Bradbury's first short story collection:

Ingenuity rather than imagination is responsible for the twenty stories in Dark Carnival by Ray Bradbury, with the result that, though several of them, like the title one, are painstakingly nasty, they do not make your flesh creep. It is a dangerous thing for a young writer to get a reputation for the macabre.

With hindsight, I think it's safe to say that the reputation for the macabre didn't do Bradbury any harm.

I am rather baffled, though, by that phrase "like the title one", because Dark Carnival doesn't have a title story! The contents of the Hamish Hamilton edition were as follows:

The Homecoming
Skeleton
The Jar
The Lake
The Tombstone
The Smiling People
The Emissary
The Traveller
The Small Assassin
The Crowd
The Handler
Let's Play 'Poison'
Uncle Einar
The Wind
The Night
There Was an Old Woman
The Dead Man
The Man Upstairs
Cistern
The Next in Line

If you are familiar with the US edition of Dark Carnival, you will notice that missing from the table of contents are "The Maiden", "Reunion", "The Coffin", "Interim", "Jack in the Box", "The Scythe", "The Night Sets". I believe post-war paper shortages were partly responsible for the UK edition being reduced from the US version.

Collectibles

Like Fahrenheit 451's book-people, I value the content of a book more highly than its physical presentation. But even I was stopped in my tracks by this first edition of Dark Carnival being auctioned on eBay. The price tag of $3500 soon persuaded me to keep moving, nothing to see here...

If you are interested in collecting Bradbury collectibles, you should read the interesting little page on Abebooks. I don't have any of those really exotic editions, but I do have a few of the Gauntlet and Subterranean limited editions. I bought them to read, however; not as an investment!