Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

INTRODUCTION Sam Weller and Mort Castle

He published in Weird Tales and The New Yorker. Just how many writers can claim such a dichotomous literary distinction? This seemingly incongruous slice of publication history only begins to illuminate the breadth, range, and wonder of the Ray Bradbury canon.

With a creative output encompassing groundbreaking works of science fiction, universally recognized tales of fantasy, and award-winning realist contemporary prose, Ray Bradbury has spent his entire career ignoring and blurring the boundaries between genre and literature. To be sure, he is part of a select cadre of authors who have performed a sort of literary legerdemain. They are, at once, creators of the innovative and the mind-bending, writers who, along the way, gate-crashed the hallowed halls of literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Jorge Luis Borges—and very few others.

This accomplished group of authors (and other powerhouses such as Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Tennessee Williams, who also examined the boundaries between literature and genre with great success but with less frequency) often wrote what might be deemed “genre fiction” to artfully examine the human condition in a new and original light.

But Ray Bradbury did not just walk in the deep and indelible footprints of his predecessors or march shoulder to shoulder with his contemporaries. Over the course of his acclaimed career, Bradbury has charted and forged his own path, altering and expanding the canon ad infinitum. And of all the mediums he has explored—novels, screenplays, teleplays, stage plays, poetry, essays, and even architectural concepts, it is, arguably, the short story that is Bradbury’s finest avocation. So much of the unforgettable in the Bradbury oeuvre is found in this form.

Who can forget stepping on the butterfly in “A Sound of Thunder”? Or the mechanized, postapocalyptic house with no human inhabitants in “There Will Come Soft Rains”? The heartbroken little Margot locked in the closet on Venus when the sun comes out for a single hour—every seven years?

And then there is Uncle Einar with his “beautiful silk-like wings” that “hung like sea-green sails behind him.”

Tally’s ghostly footprints in “The Lake.”

The space-faring colonists who land on Mars and find idyllic small-town America—populated by their deceased loved ones in “Mars Is Heaven!”

There are the glorious new sneakers, with “marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles,” in “The Sound of Summer Running.”

The Irish cabbie who has given up the drink for Lent and cannot drive safely as a result.

And the mummies in the catacombs of Guanajuato, Mexico.

And the warm Sun Domes of Venus.

And the African veldt and the children coaxing their parents to come hither…

These stories, and so many more, are what we gather to celebrate and honor in this anthology of all-new, never-before-published tales by a diverse cast of acclaimed writers. The range of contributors in this collection is a testament to Bradbury’s looming shadow and lasting artistic impact. As Nathaniel Rich declared in Slate magazine, “To the extent that there is a mythology of our age, Bradbury is one of its creators.”

Ray Bradbury has always considered himself a “teller of tales,” hailing from that time-honored tradition of oral storytelling in the market square or by the campfire.

“It is an ancient tradition,” he said in a 1964 interview, “a good one, a lovely one, a fine one. If some boy visits my tomb one hundred years from now and writes on the marble with a crayon: ‘He was a Teller of Tales,’ I will be happy.’”

A similarly venerable form of storytelling is that of “shadow theater,” an art from which this anthology derives its name. Utilizing paper cutouts held between a light source and a translucent screen, shadow puppetry dates back more than two thousand years, most experts believe, to ancient China. And like the fantastic modern myths of Bradbury himself, shadow theater also portrayed fantastic stories of fable and folklore. Its moving figures became shadowy metaphors for ancient myths and modern truths, a common motif in the voluminous literary canon of Bradbury.

Shadow shows were popular in India, Indonesia, Turkey, and beyond. By the 1880s in France, shadow puppetry had evolved, become more intricate, stylized. The form played a major role in the rise of the phantasmagoria theatrical movement in France and England during the Victorian era.

Today, in Ray Bradbury’s West Los Angeles home, a framed advertisement for the French cabaret Le Chat Noir hangs prominently on a wall. This nineteenth-century Parisian nightclub was well known for its innovative use of shadow theater. Patrons sat at tables, sipped on dark liquors, and marveled at the spectacle of light, shadow, and story.

In his 1962 autumn Gothic opus Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury himself christens his dark carnival “Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show.”

In his own literary shadow shows, he penned imaginative tales set anywhere and everywhere: colonial Mexican towns, Los Angeles tenement buildings, the foothills of Mars, the sun-warmed sidewalks of bygone America, the endless emerald woods of Ireland, behind the flapping doors of dusty carnival tents, the attics and cellars of our childhood dreams. And for all his enduring and fearless artistic genius, he has earned the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; the 2004 National Medal of Arts (conferred by the president of the United States); the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and so many more honors. Writing in the age(s) of mass media, Bradbury has seen his stories leave a lasting impact, not just through books but also in dramatic radio, television, film, and comic books.

Along with all the awards, accolades, and achievements, Ray Bradbury has attained a sort of influential stature that comes as both delight and surprise to him: teacher and preacher, father figure, and artist exemplar to ever so many in all manner of creative endeavor. He and his work continue to reach out and provide the spark to artistic imagination for generations young and old, creators who themselves have often blurred the lines between genre and literature, the fantastically imagined and the closely observed real. The puppeteer has countless apprentices.

In Shadow Show, this celebration of Ray Bradbury, artists who have been profoundly influenced by him pen their own short stories in homage, stories that through image, theme, or concept are either ever so obviously or ever so subtly “Bradbury-informed.” From the lyrical magic of Dandelion Wine, to the shifting sands of Mars, to the roiling mist of The October Country, Bradbury’s literary achievements in all their scope are honored by a host of today’s top writers. Shadow Show pre-sents our most exciting authors, who, like the honoree, are not contained or constrained by category or locale, as they touch the Bradbury base for inspiration to explore their own singular, wildest imaginings.

The stories in this volume are neither sequels nor pastiches but rather distinctive fictive visions by writers inspired by a single common touchstone: the enduring works of Ray Bradbury.

Over the years, in many of the captivating introductions to his own books, Bradbury has examined the origins of his stories. In these personal, illuminating reflections, he has allowed readers to come behind his translucent screen, as it were, to witness the intricate and artful machinations of the shadow show itself.

In keeping with this tradition, all twenty-six contributors to Shadow Show have penned afterwords to their stories, spotlighting the Bradburian influence either on them or on their story or both. Contributors took from Bradbury what was most important and salient to them and used it to perform their own theater.

In the book’s fitting opening story, “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury,” Neil Gaiman explores the concept of a man whose failing memory is causing him to lose hold of the very short stories and books that changed his life.

In “Conjure,” Alice Hoffman offers a delicate yet tough tale of summertime enchantment and friendship—and what is left behind at the change of seasons.

Thriller master David Morrell writes of guardian angels in a whole new light.

Bradbury’s old friend, legendary science-fiction and fantasy writer Harlan Ellison, pens what he describes as “very likely his last published story”; “Weariness” is a soul-stirring tale of galactic proportions as the entire universe goes dark, a science-fictional metaphor for the author’s own fading mortality.

Authors Margaret Atwood and Charles Yu utilize science fiction as social satire (as did Bradbury in his classic novel Fahrenheit 451 and in stories such as “The Veldt”) in decidedly different ways.

Some of the tales contained within can be directly traced to a single Bradbury yarn. Joe Hill’s haunting and melancholy “By the Silver Waters of Lake Champlain” is a sibling to Bradbury’s classic story “The Fog Horn.” Pulitzer Prize winner Julia Keller writes a story not far removed thematically and structurally from “The Whole Town’s Sleeping.” National Book Award finalist Bonnie Jo Campbell brings us a modern, twisted descendant of the “forest witch,” who first marred the body of “the Illustrated Man.” John McNally pens a story hailing directly from The October Country. Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin writes a melancholic near epiphany on a shared wavelength with Bradbury’s classic “I See You Never.” Dave Eggers’s “Who Knocks?” (a title that, incidentally, gets its name from Bradbury’s first book appearance in 1946) is a story of pure delight, fright, and surprise.

There are tales set amidst the stars and stories set on the hushed streets of small-town Midwest America. These are stories of the past, the present, and the future.

Shadow Show gathers Oprah’s Book Club authors, New York Times bestselling authors, National Book Award finalists, a Newbery Medal winner, multiple World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award winners and nominees, a convocation of word workers who voyage into that dark and chimerical and wondrous territory so altered and mutated by the man who has been deemed “the Master of Miracles.”

In the introduction to Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, a 1952 anthology of fantastic fiction and magical realism that he edited, Ray Bradbury writes: “Beginning writers often err in thinking that if one magic trick is good, then sixteen magic tricks, running as a team, must be sixteen times better. Nothing could be further from the truth. Good fantasy must be allowed to move casually upon the reader, in the air he breathes. It must be woven into the story so as to be, at times, almost unrecognizable.”

In keeping with Bradbury’s philosophy of magic and story, we present to you Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury. At the very core of each of these tales, you will find that single trick, that unforgettable metaphor, a feat of narrative legerdemain.

And so we welcome you to Shadow Show. Pull up a seat. Get yourself a drink.

And now it is that the houselights dim.

The velvet curtain rises.

And the shadows begin to play…