Today (August 22, 2020) marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ray Bradbury. If you’ll indulge a bit of nostalgia, I’m going to discuss the impact Ray had on my life.

It must have been the 6th grade, but it might have been the 5th. It’s been too many years now to be sure. One day in Mr. Thayer’s reading class, there was a guest waiting when we arrived from whatever class we’d been in before.

I don’t recall the gentleman’s name, but he was there to read to us. He told us was going to read a story by Ray Bradbury, who was a science fiction writer.

The guy immediately had my attention. I don’t recall what I said, but I made some outburst of enthusiasm. I had recently discovered science fiction as a genre, in large part due to Star Wars. I had been aware of it through comics and shows I’d watched on TV, but I hadn’t really grokked what it was until recently. I was familiar with Ray Bradbury’s name as well. The children’s section of the Wichita Falls public library was in the basement, and there was a spinner rack of paperbacks near the stairs. Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes was on it, as were some Twilight Zone collections by some guy named Rod Serling.

There were also several Bantam paperback editions of Ray Bradbury’s books, most of them the editions with a pencil sketch of Bradbury in front of a painting.  The Martian Chronicles. S is for Space. The Illustrated Man. The Golden Apples of the Sun. Something Wicked This Way Comes. I’d like to get a set of those editions just for the cover art.

My excitement was  diminished a little when he told me the story he was going to read wasn’t science fiction. He proceeded to read “The Screaming Woman” from S is for Space, the story of a young girl who hears a woman buried in a vacant lot screaming when the girl cuts through the lot. Only no one would believe her when she tries to tell adults.

I loved it. I had been reading mysteries enthusiastically before I discovered science was a genre, and this story was basically a mystery story. I began checking out the Bradbury books from the library. When I would find them is second hand shops a couple of years later when we moved to Paris (Texas, not France) and I had more freedom of movement, I would buy them.

One of the first I read was The Martian Chronicles. Another was The Illustrated Man. As I moved from elementary school to junior high to high school, these were followed by Fahrenheit 451, The October Country, A Medicine for Melancholy, The Golden Apples of the Sun. And all the others I could get my hands on.

I enjoyed them all. But the stories I liked the most, the ones that fired my imagination, that sent shivers down my spine, were the older stories, the ones that had first seen print in the pulps, although at the time I didn’t really understand what the pulps had been. I’d not seen one at that time. (This was years before the internet). The later stories, the ones written for markets like The Saturday Evening Post and other slicks didn’t have the same effect on teenage me. Those stories were good, but in many ways I wasn’t old enough to really appreciate them. Dandelion Wine comes to mind, a book I’ve grown to appreciate more over the years than when I read it as a sixth grader.

My favorites were stories like “The Scythe”, “The Veldt”, “Mars is Heaven”, “The Small Assassin”, “Zero Hour”, “Usher II”.

When I bought The Best of Henry Kuttner from the Science Fiction Book Club and read Bradbury’s introduction about how Kuttner had mentored him, and then I read the first story in that collection, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”, I immediately saw Kuttner’s influence on Bradbury.

Reading Ray Bradbury at that impressionable age was a life altering experience, one for the better. Bradbury taught me about taking an idea and making a short story out of it, about the importance of character, and the effectiveness and punch of a killer last line. Lessons I try to incorporate into my own writing. If I ever get to the point where I can write half as well as Ray Bradbury, I will consider that a success.

There are only a handful of authors in my library who have their own dedicated shelves. Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton.

And Ray Bradbury. I need to move his books to a different bookcase. They won’t all fit on the current shelf. I’ve got the first three volumes of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury on a different bookcase, along with a copy of Twice 22 (an omnibus of The Golden Apples of the Sun and A Medicine for Melancholy). Hard Case Crime is publishing Bradbury’s crime stories (Killer Come Back to Me), and I need to find a place for that.

I reread “The Screaming Woman” last night for the first time in many years. It’s still has the same effect it had on me way back when. I also reread “A Scent of Sarsaparilla”, in which a old man discovers a portal into the past in his attic, and “The Town Where No One Got Off”, about the dangers of getting off a train in a town where no one knows you. All three were glimpses of an America that has in many way vanished. All three reminded me of why I love Bradbury’s work.

So, Ray, I want to say thanks. For the thrills, the frights, and the fun. May you live forever through your words.