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…
A SECOND HOMECOMING
Ray Bradbury
I suppose you are wondering why I have called you to a family reunion. Let me explain.
In 2006 the United States Post Office issued a stamp commemorating Edgar Allan Poe. I rushed out and purchased several books and placed the stamps on all of my outgoing mail. I sent these letters to friends and family around the world. When I looked at that portrait of Mr. Poe, I knew I was looking at my true papa. You see, when I was eight years old, growing up in Waukegan, Illinois, my Aunt Neva gave me a copy of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I was never the same. I read “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Raven,” of course. The language was bejeweled and ornate, like an encrusted Fabergé egg. The ideas were frightening and fantastic, and I was in love.
Over the years, there have been other papas: L. Frank Baum, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne. Then there were my mothers: Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, and Eudora Welty. I had my midwives, too: Shakespeare and the Bible.
Now, many years later and very late in time, an incredible thing has occurred. Within the book you now hold in your hands, I find I am no longer the son; instead, I am the father. The twenty-six authors gathered in this collection of remarkable and varied stories have all come home to Papa, and I couldn’t be more proud. My family is a family of circus people, a strange and wonderful midnight carnival of performers, lion tamers, magicians, and beautiful freaks. They make this reunion remarkable.
In this book, you will discover tales set in dark basements and tales set in the dark velocities of deep space; there are stories in small towns and big cities. Here you will find guardian angels and inner-demons. There are characters who are haunted without a ghost in sight. There are quiet stories, happy stories, sad stories, frightening stories. This book reads like a transcription of my own nightmares and daydreams. These are stories of fantasy and science fiction and mystery—and, most of all, of imagination.
And I wonder how this all happened. How did the son of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe become father to so many?
When I look back on my career, I realize that I blundered my way into success. Never once did I know what I was doing. I just did it. But I blundered with great enthusiasm and, most of all, with love. I was in love with stories. And now I find my children expressing their love, and I am so grateful.
Perhaps you are familiar with my story “The Homecoming.” That story was rejected by Weird Tales as being too off-trail, too untraditional. On a whim, I sent it off to Mademoiselle, a quality magazine that published literary fiction. To my great surprise, they purchased the story and ran it in the October 1946 issue. They changed the entire magazine that month to accommodate my story, turning the issue into a celebration of autumn. They hired New Yorker artist Charles Addams to do a wonderful illustration that depicted the characters from the story, a family of vampires and fantastic monsters all returning home to their northern Illinois Victorian mansion for a reunion.
In it, a family of beautiful creatures—loving, winged uncles, doting, telepathic aunts, and fantastic brethren from all over the world—gather to give thanks, of course, on Halloween.
In many ways this book is a second Homecoming for me. My family has all come home for this loving celebration, and I couldn’t be happier. Papa embraces his children with open wings.
I welcome you to the reunion, too.