80 ~ The New Atlantis
Lauren Weiner
Copyright 2012. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.
movies — Michael Crichton’s Jurassic
Park and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter
series, to name two — are unthinkable
without Bradbury. And in the words
of the prolific American horror writer
Stephen King, “without Ray Bradbury,
there is no Stephen King.”
T
he youthful experiences that
made Bradbury into a writer
preoccupied him throughout his
life. Bradbury’s much-beloved novel
Dandelion Wine is a thinly veiled fic-
tionalization of many of his sweeter
reminiscences — but even these could
take an odd turn. “I loved to watch my
grandmother eviscerate the turkey,”
he once said, a memory that sums up
his most characteristic literary trait:
taking homey Americana and bending
it in a violent or grotesque direction.
His most seminal stories wrung terror
out of common occurrences, such as
going into a ravine that ran through
the residential section of his native
Waukegan, Illinois at nighttime. In the
story “The Night,” an eight-year-old
boy — the author’s alter-ego — simply
scares himself. There is no ghost or
criminal lurking, only the panic that
wells up in all of us when we get lost
in a dark, damp place and know we
are alone in the universe, in the “vast
swelling loneliness,” feeling the pres-
ence of “an ogre called Death.”
Bradbury spent his childhood goos-
ing his imagination with the outland-
ish. Whenever mundane Waukegan
was visited by the strange or the
offbeat, young Ray was on hand.
The vaudevillian magician Harry
Blackstone came through the industri-
al port on Lake Michigan’s shore in the
late 1920s. Seeing Blackstone’s show
over and over again marked Bradbury
deeply, as did going to carnivals and
circuses, and watching Hollywood’s
earliest horror offerings like Dracula
and The Phantom of the Opera. He read
heavily in Charles Dickens, George
Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G.
Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, L. Frank
Baum, and Edgar Rice Burroughs;
the latter’s inspirational and romantic
children’s adventure tales earned him
Bradbury’s hyperbolic designation as
“probably the most influential writer
in the entire history of the world.”
Then there was the contagious
enthusiasm of Bradbury’s bohemian,
artistic aunt and his grandfather,
Samuel, who ran a boardinghouse in
Waukegan and instilled in Bradbury
a kind of wonder at modern life. He
recounted: “When I was two years
old I sat on his knee and he had me
tickle a crystal with a feathery needle
and I heard music from thousands of
miles away. I was right then and there
introduced to the birth of radio.”
His family’s temporary stay in
Arizona in the mid-1920s and perma-
nent relocation to Los Angeles in the
1930s brought Bradbury to the desert
places that he would later reimag-
ine as Mars. As a high-schooler he
buzzed around movie and radio stars
asking for autographs, briefly consid-
ered becoming an actor, and wrote
and edited science fiction “fanzines”
