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 - The Small Assassin

This is the tenth 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: The Small Assassin

First edition, paperback, Ace 1962. The Small Assassin is a British book with no direct US counterpart. Cover artist unknown.

 

The Book

The Small Assassin is, to us Brits, as essential a Bradbury volume as any other. But it is solely a British volume, with no equivalent in the US. It contains thirteen stories, all of them "leftovers" from the UK editions of Dark Carnival and The October Country. How this came about is bit difficult to explain...

1. Ray's usual British paperback publisher Corgi Books turned down the option to publish The October Country, as they didn't feel that a book of horror stories matched their usual style.
2. In 1961, Ace Books stepped in and bought The October Country, but decided to drop seven of the stories ("The Next in Line", "The Lake", "The Small Assassin", "The Crowd", "Jack-in-the-Box", "The Man Upstairs", and "The Cistern". Although they also decided to add "The Traveller", which had appeared in Dark Carnival, but not in The October Country.
3.  (Are you with me so far? There will be a quiz later.)
4. In 1962, Ace took those seven deleted stories, put them together with the remaining six stories from Dark Carnival, and issued the result as The Small Assassin. The table of contents of the resulting volume is here.
   

Another way of looking at it is to say that if you have the UK paperback of The October Country and the UK paperback The Small Assassin, you have in your possession the complete contents of the outt-of-print UK edition of Dark Carnival. (But don't forget that the UK Dark Carnival is a cut-down version of the US edition!)

As far as I am aware, there has never been a hardcover edition of The Small Assassin; it has spent its entire existence in paperback. The last edition to see print was the Grafton edition of 1986. In its twenty-four years in print, it had just three more cover designs, all of them somewhat mismatched to the contents:

The three subsequent covers for The Small Assassin. The art for the middle one is by Richard Clifton-Dey. The others are uncredited. I have a particular dislike for the baby alien/robot on the right, who adorned the first edition I ever owned. He is so obviously a science-fictional creature, and yet this is so obviously not a science fiction book!

So, it's a book of leftovers. Or, alternatively, another one of those remixes which serve only to confuse the Bradbury collector.

The Stories

Now, I have covered some of the Small Assassin stories already, when I blogged about Dark Carnival and The October Country, so I will not repeat myself here - except to say that I heartily recommend "The Crowd" and "The Lake", which I discussed here. As for the others:

"The Small Assassin" - I've mentioned this tale a few times, and it is one of Ray's most anthologised stories - just look at its number of appreances as recorded on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. In case you've somehow managed to avoid being exposed to this classic tale, I'll summarise it by saying it's the one where a woman suspects that her new-born baby is out to kill her. As David Mogen points out (Ray Bradbury, Twayne 1986, p.57) this is a reverse of the monster/innocent victim scenario we would normally expect in a horror tale - and is an instance of "parent abuse" rather than child abuse!

It's classic Bradburyan paranoia of the type we have seen in "The Crowd", "The Wind", "Skeleton" and "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl". And as with most of those stories, the paranoid protagonist turns out to be justified in their paranoia. Bradbury, in his classic horror period, was never one to leave the reader to decide; he nearly always set things up to make you think the hero is crazy, then make you empathise with them, and then vindicate them.

Alice Leiber, the mother, is proof that Bradbury can write strong women characters. You will sometimes hear criticisms that most of his characters are male, especially in something like The Martian Chronicles. But he does have a number of memorable strong females. And if he adheres to the Hitchcockian motto of "torture the heroine", he can at least be defended on the grounds that, actually, he usually tortures his male heroes as well.

The unsung star of "The Small Assassin" is Dr Jeffers, the sceptical doctor whose role is to calm and placate Alice. Until he ends up convinced that she is right...

One last thing to say about "The Small Assassin": it may have its origins, in a sense, in Bradbury's own experience. One of Bradbury's oddest claims was that he remembered his own birth. "Preposterous", I hear you cry; and I cry the same thing. Nevertheless, Ray insisted that he could recall "the camera angle" as he emerged into this world, as well as the pain of being born, and his infant desire to return back to the womb. Whether you believe it or not (and I don't, not for one minute), it was this "memory" which provided the germ of the idea of a child which resents being born, and which desires to exact revenge on those responsible. Bradbury's account is given in countless interviews, but is most clearly explained in Sam Weller's biography, The Bradbury Chronicles (Wm. Morrow, 2005, p. 12).



"The Next in Line" - again, one that I've mentioned before. Again, it's a story with its roots in Bradbury's personal experience, this time based on his visit to Guanajuato in Mexico, where he saw the mummies in the catacombs. The story is what Sam Weller describes as "one of the most powerful stories [...], a psychologically complex creation, dripping with gothic atmosphere [...] Bradbury at his poetic best."

Here's the first view we get as our protagonists enter the graveyard on their way to the mummies:

         It was several mornings after the celebratory fiesta of El Dia de Muerte, the Day of the Dead, and ribbons and ravels of tissue and sparkle-tape still clung like insane hair to the raised stones, to the hand-carved, love-polished crucifixes, and to the above-ground tombs which resembled marble jewel-cases. There were statues frozen in angelic postures over gravel mounds, and intricately carved stones tall as men with angels spilling all down their rims, and tombs as big and ridiculous as beds put out to dry in the sun after some nocturnal accident. And within the four walls of the yard, inserted into square mouths and slots, were coffins, walled in, plated in by marble plates and plaster, upon which names were struck and upon which hung tin pictures, cheap peso portraits of the inserted dead. Thumb-tacked to the different pictures were trinkets they'd loved in life, silver charms, silver arms, legs, bodies, silver cups, silver dogs, silver church medallions, bits of red crape and blue ribbon. On some places were painted slats of tin showing the dead rising to heaven in oil-tinted angels' arms.

And the mummies themselves:

          They resembled nothing more than those preliminary erections of a sculptor, the wire frame, the first tendons of clay, the muscles, and a thin lacquer of skin. They were unfinished, all one hundred and fifteen of them.
          They were parchment-colored and the skin was stretched as if to dry, from bone to bone. The bodies were intact, only the watery humors had evaporated from them.
          "The climate," said the caretaker. "It preserves them. Very dry."
          "How long have they been here?" asked Joseph.
          "Some one year, some five, senor, some ten, some seventy."

 Such precise language in those descriptions - poetic, yes, but with a photographic clarity.

One of the strengths of the story is the way it gradually shifts away from the twin protagonists of Joseph and Marie - they're both together, and Joseph seems to have made their plans for them - to the focus on Marie alone, but with a final shift at the end to Joseph alone (the final shift being for reasons which you will discover when you read the story).

As with "The Small Assassin", there is a strong focus on a central female character here, albeit another "tortured heroine".

 

The Adaptations

"The Small Assassin" has been adapted for visual media a couple of times, and has turned out well each time. The story has a lot of visual suspense built in, such as the baby's carefully placed toy, intended to cause the mother to trip. Bradbury himself adapted it in 1988 for The Ray Bradbury Theater, and director Chris Charles oversaw a short film version released in 2006.

Dr Jeffers, as played by Cyril Cusack (of Fahrenheit 451 fame) in the RBT production of "The Small Assassin".

The chief suspect in the RBT production of "The Small Assassin".

A troubled mother from the 2006 short film...

...and the dastardly deed committed by the evil child.

"The Next in Line", on the other hand, has worked well on radio. While the story could work well on the screen, it also lends itself to the "better pictures" you often get in the sound-only medium, as evidenced by the BBC Fear on Four series, with a 1992 script by Brian Sibley.

Many of the other stories from The Small Assassin have also been adapted: "The Lake", "The Crowd", "The Man Upstairs", "The Tombstone", "The Handler", "Let's Play Poison" and "The Dead Man" all turned up on The Ray Bradbury Theater, all (of course) dramatised by Bradbury himself. In all, eight stories out of the thirteeen in the book were adapted for that series, probably something of a record.

Find Out More...

See my page for The Small Assassin, here.

Read my review of Bradbury's own screen adaptation of "The Small Assassin" here, and my review of the Chris Charles short film here.

Listen and Watch...

Watch Bradbury's TV adaptation of "The Small Assassin" here. And see the trailer for the 2006 short film here.

Read about Brian Sibley's adaptation of "The Next in Line", and listen to a recording of the play here.

 

Next Up...

The next of my Lockdown Choices will be Bradbury's second book of the year 1962: Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The Small Assassin

One of Ray Bradbury's most successful stories of his early career is "The Small Assassin". First published in 1946, it has been anthologised countless times, and appears in no less than five of his own short story collections. It has also been imitated and ripped off in several feature films and made-for-tv movies.

As far as official adaptations go, however, there seem to have only been two so far. The first was for Bradbury's own TV series in 1988. In this version, which Bradbury scripted himself, there were a few changes from the original story, but a strong central performance from Cyril Cusack as Dr Jeffers. My review of the episode can be read here.

The second adaptation is the more "faithful" version directed by Chris Charles in 2006. It is interesting to compare the two attempts to bring Bradbury's story to the screen. There are a lot of challenges. Should the film-maker show the baby as evil, or leave it to be judged from the responses of the parents? (Bradbury's own adaptation show's us the baby's point-of-view, which tips us off that something is up; Charles' version has an innocent child throughout) How to handle the complex shifts of viewpoint that the short story uses? (Bradbury re-writes, casting Jeffers as the strong central thread, condensing the parents' deaths into a single event; Charles follows the original text, passing the focus of the story from one character to the next).

Although I posted a page for the Chris Charles version of The Small Assassin over a year ago, I have only now got round to writing a review - click here to read it.

New Findings: Old Stuff

I've been making new finds of old stuff on the web, most of them thanks to Google Alerts. Here are some curios that have just come to my attention.

Ever wondered what happened to the monorail Montag used to get home in Truffaut's film of Fahrenheit 451? It was a real monorail in France, built as a protoype, and Truffaut chose it because of its futuristic appearance.

The monorail is no longer in existence, but a few years ago some monorail enthusiasts tracked down what remains of the system, including the vandalised car and some sections of track. Find out more by visiting Randy Lambertus's page from 1999.

Going back to 1993, we find Ray Bradbury being interviewed about his alleged total recall. This unlikely gift is what allows him to remember the moment of his own birth. No one really believes this claim, but his belief in it led him to write one of his classic short stories, "The Small Assassin". Bradbury has discussed this in many interviews, but this one from YouTube is one I hadn't seen before. It's from a Canadian TV show called Prisoners of Gravity.

The Veldt: New Radio Adaptation

"I wrote The Veldt because my subconscious knew more about children than has often been told." Ray Bradbury wrote these words in his introduction to his stage play version of his classic story.

"The Veldt" tells the story of a futuristic nursery, where children are kept occupied by a virtual reality environment, which can conjure up any world they can imagine. The children's parents ultimately pay the price for offloading childcare responsbilities onto a machine.

Bradbury seems to have concocted this tale primarily as an observation on the potential for "evil" inherent in children. As such it is a companion piece to "Zero Hour", "The Small Assassin" and "The Playground". In all of these tales, children conspire to do bad things.

"The Veldt" has remained one of Bradbury's most popular stories, and has been adapted for radio, television and film many times. Its popularity back in the 1950s was giving a huge helping hand by the radio adaptations. These, no doubt, came about in part because Bradbury's nursery is an obvious analogy for the then new - and, to radio, threatening - medium of television.

Bradbury has little interest in technology, and probably didn't care that his story was criticised for technological implausibility. However, the story has been used many times over the years as an exemplar of virtual reality, and today's technology (particularly in interactive media) seems to have at last caught up with Bradbury's once implausible concept.

A "modernised" version of Bradbury's story has just been produced by BBC radio. It builds in some of our modern day concerns about how children waste/spend their time. In my view, little modernisation is really necessary, since Bradbury got the issues spot on in the original story. However, playwright Mike Walker has created a vibrant new version on the story. And anyway, I am always pleased to encounter a new dramatisation of a Bradbury story.

If you are quick, you can catch the play via the BBC's "Listen Again" feature by clicking here. The link will be valid until 28th May, after which the BBC will replace it with a different play.

The Small Assassin - premiere screening

I can't get there myself - on account of a few thousand miles of ocean being in the way- but the short film adaptation of "The Small Assassin" is shortly to be premiered.

I have some information and links on the film here.

The film is being shown as an evening of shorts from Beverly Ridge Pictures in Chicago, Illinois.

More Short Films

A remarkable number of Ray Bradbury's stories have been made into short films. Many of these are independent productions, often made by film-makers who are just starting out. Examples include the recent A Piece of Wood and The Small Assassin.

But there have also been quite a few "educational" films, usually aimed at children, and presumably intended for classroom use. Examples include the Learning Corporation of America productions The Electric Grandmother and The Invisible Boy.

I thought I knew about all of these shorts, but new information keeps turning up. I recently had my attention drawn to The Flying Machine, a 16-minute short starring Blade Runner's James Hong (left), and Diane Haak's 1979 version of The Veldt (24-minutes). I haven't seen either of these, and have very little information on them. I hope to see them one day, and would welcome hearing from anyone who knows more about them.

"This isn't a good way of problem-solving"

The quote above is from a parent, commenting on the children of Bradbury's "The Veldt" plotting and observing the death of their parents.

This is the latest attempt to get Bradbury removed from the classroom. There is a great irony here: Bradbury has such a deep and intuitive understanding of the child mind, that his stories are ideal for the classroom - and in the US he is very widely taught. But because he writes tales of horror and suspense and often, famously, writes about a future in order to prevent it, he comes under attack from parents and occasionally librarians who would like to protect the innocents.

(Of course, anyone who thinks children are innocent should definitely be reading "The Veldt" and "The Small Assassin", among others.)

For more on the challenge to "The Veldt" (which was rejected, by the way), see this report from the Beaverton Valley Times.

By some quirk of irony, this week is also apparently Banned Books Week, an event sponsored by American Booksellers Association, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, American Library Association, Association of American Publishers, American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores. Naturally, Fahrenheit 451 springs to mind whenever we think of banning books, and this report makes the customary mention.

Farewell Summer, video odds and ends

Advanced reviews have started to appear for Ray Bradbury's forthcoming book Farewell Summer. This, you may recall, is his sequel to Dandelion Wine (1957), although most of it was written at the same time as the original novel, and both books were originally conceived by Bradbury as a single novel.

Publisher's Review's text is posted on the Amazon page for the book. Kirkus Review's text is available on their site, but only to paying subscribers. However, over at the Ray Bradbury Message Board, Walloon has posted the Kirkus text. Many thanks, Walloon.

There are some interesting Bradbury-related video clips on YouTube these days. Nard has alerted me to Exposure Three: a short behind-the-scenes feature on the making of The Small Assassin. And then there is this quirky little piece: The Adventures of Ray Bradbury. This is a little comedy that parodies the persona of Bradbury - not so much his fiction or writing style, but his Ray Bradbury Theater persona. Until I saw this, it had never occurred to me that Bradbury was a celebrity capable of being parodied, but I guess he is!

Other Bradbury-related material on YouTube can be found here.

Bradbury short films

Ray Bradbury's stories make very inviting material for short films, and some of the best adaptations of his work have been in the short form. 2006 has seen at least two low-budget shorts based on Bradbury stories.

"The Small Assassin" is directed by Chris Charles, and brings to life Bradbury's classic tale of paranoia (mother becomes convined her newborn is out to kill her). The story has been adapted several times in the past, most notably as one of the British episodes of Ray Bradbury Theater. Judging by the trailer for this new production, it will rival the TV version.

"A Piece of Wood" is directed by Tony Baez Milan, and is an adaptation of Bradbury's anti-war fantasy. For a while this film was apparently viewable online, but seems to no longer be available outside of the short film festival circuit.