Ray Bradbury: farewell to the creative genius who warped my teenage mind

I’ve probably read more short stories by Ray Bradbury than those of any other writer. I read most of them between the ages of 12 and 16, when his only real competition were Roald Dahl’s twisted short stories for grown-ups. The first book of Bradbury short stories I can remember reading was The Silver Locusts (The Martian Chronicles in the US).

I found it in amongst discarded boxes of mouldering books while staying at the house (vast country mansion attached to several hundred acres of farmland, actually) of some family friends one rainy summer in Scotland when I was twelve. I appropriated that paperback copy of The Silver Locusts, and still have it. (Okay, dammit – I half-inched an American paperback version of The Catcher in the Rye from the same heap.) Bradbury’s stories were the first that were truly, magically transporting. I can still remember the effect of reading “Mars is Heaven!” in which the members of an expedition to Mars discover that it resembles a perfectly lovely, sun-drenched, white-picket-fence small American town of the 1920s which is full of their lost loved ones. But of course, it turns out – horribly - not to be like that at all…

The nostalgia-drenched evocation of idyllic small-town American life has stayed with me ever since: it was like a 1930s American movie, only more evocative and haunting and somehow permanent – a large part of my mental image of America is based on Bradbury’s fiction, including the scary bits.

Unlike most of his SF and horror-writing contemporaries, Bradbury became mainstream (his stories even appeared in Playboy), helped by movie versions of Farenheit 451 and The Illustrated Man, and the fact that he was distrustful of technology. He sold an awful lot of books, but he never really found a literary home. The SF community were always disdainful of his disregard for hard science, and the snooty literary world tended to sneer at his sentimentality, his occasionally florid prose style and his frequent lapses into easy nostalgia. Had he been in the least bit interested, the horror community would have clasped him to its collective bosom: his 1940s horror stories are remarkably nasty and superbly effective (the killer baby in “The Small Assassin” is a particular favourite of mine) – but he later disowned many of them (getting married and having children tends to mellow a chap).

My favourite collection of his stories (albeit masquerading as a novel) was the aforementioned The Illustrated Man – the myriad tattoos on a tramp’s body come to life and tell a series of stories – which formed part of my teenage Bradbury-fest (which also encompassed Dandelion Wine, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The October Country and The Day it Rained Forever). Some twenty years later I finally got round to reading 1962’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a horror fantasy novel in which two thirteen year-old boys have some truly unpleasant experiences with the sinister Mr Dark, the head of a travelling carnival show that visits their town one October – it is so stuffed with classic, iconic, rural American themes, it’s like a distillation of pre-1960s non-urban America. It is wonderful.

Bradbury moved into detective fiction in the 1980s, but it was one genre to which his prose style seemed utterly unsuited.

Ultimately, Ray Bradbury didn’t need genres or critical acclaim from mainstream critics: he described himself as a writer of Fantasy, but he wasn't really - rather, he created his own unique, personal genre, and over the years he shaped the imaginations of millions of readers. Many of his stories are extremely unsettling – but his influence was wholly benign.

Whichever version of heaven the great man has gone to, I hope, as a reward for the pleasure he's given so many of us, that it resembles a small American town on a balmy, sun-filled day sometime in the 1920s, that there’s a gentle breeze blowing through fields of corn and that there’s a carnival on the edge of town…