Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury

[filkertom]

Eighty-six and going strong.

What's your favorite Bradbury story or stories? I love Something Wicked This Way Comes, but not as much as I love I Sing The Body Electric. (The TV adaptation. The Electric Grandmother, starring Maureen Stapleton [with Paul Benedict as Mr. Fantoccini] had me calling my grandmother from Cincinnati where I lived at the time, bawling about how much I loved her and missed her. Just bawling.) And there's very little that can overcome the chills delilvered by There Will Come Soft Rains and The October Game.

Comments

[batyatoon]

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the first (and so far really the only) work of fiction to ever keep me awake at night after I'd finished reading it. Brrrrrr. So, so beautiful and creepy.

"The Long Rain" seems to me to be the story that most perfectly achieves what Poe says is a short-story writer should attempt: begin with the effect you want the story to have on the reader, and put nothing in the story that doesn't contribute directly to that effect. I come out of that story with the tremendously intense feeling of having just come in out of a long hard rain. Every time.

"Downwind from Gettysburg" was the story that made me cry. Both in itself, and in the crushing certainty that I will never be able to write like that, not in a million years.



And and and "The Fog Horn". And Dandelion Wine. And "The Toynbee Convector". And The Halloween Tree. And "April 2005: Usher II". And...

God, I love Ray Bradbury.