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All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury
Edited by Sam Weller and Mort
Castle
William Morrow Paperbacks
July 10, 2012/ ISBN 978-0062122681
SF & Fantasy Anthology - Tribute
Amazon
Reviewed
by Beth E. McKenzie
It’s not
that I didn’t want to; but I just couldn’t read them
all at one sitting. Each contributor had been asked to write what
they considered a Bradbury-esque short story and of course they
did a very good job of it. Hallmark to this style is the subtle
building of tension until the end when you hear “pop”
and all of the emotions are released. Sometimes they ease out like
a refreshing hiss from a bottle top, and at others you feel like
Old Faithful just found a new route through your heart- a rowdy
jumble of fear, love, hope, despair – everything at once because
one small brain just saw truth in the universe. So of course I couldn’t
read them all at once. They wore me out.
I had forgotten that Ray Bradbury wrote horror. We talk about the
science fiction and the fantasy, but the beauty of what he did was
make the SF&F a backdrop, then a familiar environment, and finally
a real place where the bogey man can get you too. Most of the stories
in the anthology tip more to what I consider horror, which is anything
that will wake me up in the night. “Who Knocks” has
done so already, “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain”
and “Two Houses” will do that at some point. These three
stories are also the ones I will most likely mix up and think of
as authentic Bradbury tales.
Few of these stories have what I consider happy endings. The exceptions
are “Backwards in Seville” because a daughter’s
dream of a new life for her father comes true, and “Children
of the Bedtime Machine” because a woman in desperate times
finds out that she has the power to make her life, and the lives
of others, more enjoyable.
One of the stories, “Fat Man and Little Boy”, I fear,
will be judged predictive in our future. I receive a Facebook post
every few days that generally says, “Like if you agree that
Welfare Recipients should have to pass a drug test.” If I
respond, I always do it with a question, “Who’s next?”
You can thank Ray Bradbury and Friends for that question.
Each author was asked to write an “Afterword” about
their story and their links to Ray Bradbury. It is one of these
afterwards that affected me the most, the emotional eruption even
more intense for finding my own truths written in it. This one life-sketch
did more to make Ray Bradbury a real person to me than all the interviews
and stories combined. As a child, Dan Chaon, author of “Little
America”, sent Ray Bradbury a letter and some of his stories.
Bradbury responded and encouraged the young man. They established
a pen-friendship, which Chaon let go when it became too intense
during college. They met in later life. I’m not going to tell
you what happened, but it was more Bradbury-esque that even Bradbury
could have written and will tug at my heart forever.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Sam Weller and Mort Castle - Introduction
Ray Bradbury - Second Homecoming
Neil Gaiman - The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury
Margaret Atwood - Headlife
Jay Bonansinga - Heavy
Sam Weller - The Girl in The Funeral Parlor
David Morrell - The Companions
Thomas F. Monteleone - The Exchange
Lee Martin - Cat on a Bad Couch
Joe Hill - By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain
Dan Chaon - Little America
John McNally - The Phone Call
Joe Meno - Young Pilgrims
Robert McCammon - Children of the Bedtime Machine
Ramsey Campbell - The Page
Mort Castle - Light
Alice Hoffman - Conjure
John Maclay - Max
Jacqueline Mitchard - Two of A Kind
Gary Braunbeck - Fat Man and Little Boy
Bonnie Jo Campbell - The Tattoo
Audrey Niffenegger - Backwards in Seville
Charles Yu - Earth: (A Gift Shop)
Julia Keller - Hayleigh's Dad
Dave Eggers - Who Knocks?
Bayo Ojikutu - Reservation 2020
Kelly Link - Two Houses
Harlan Ellison - Weariness
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