Bradbury the Martian

I was ten or so when I pulled my dad’s copy of The October Country off the bookshelves, looking for something that would scare me in that thrilling way. I had read The Halloween Tree and was anxious to jump back into that strangely poetic-sounding but eerie world of Bradbury’s Green Town Gothic. The stories in my dad’s book did their job well, from “The Small Assassin” to my personal favorite, “The Lake.” Other Bradbury works called to me, and, although I liked the science fiction of The Martian Chronicles and R Is for Rocket, the scary stories were always my favorites.

A Graveyard for Lunatics is one of Bradbury’s later efforts, published in 1990. It combines many of his favorite themes: the movies, the nature of friendship, and the allure of the land of illusion and fantasy. It begins in Hollywood on Halloween night (Bradbury’s favorite night) in 1954, when a young sci-fi author and screenwriter stumbles across what appears to be the body of a legendary studio mogul…who had died in a mysterious accident exactly twenty years before. As he tries to find the answers to the mysterious events that happen in rapid succession after his discovery, we see his encounters with a megalomaniac German-Chinese film director, an aging starlet, a paranoid and reclusive autograph hound, an actor who not only plays Jesus Christ but thinks he is J.C., and an amazingly talented special-effect model maker. The usual gang, in other words.

When I first read Dandelion Wine many years ago, I decided, in my undergraduate wisdom, that Bradbury really wrote poetry disguised as prose. His wildly evocative descriptions and headlong emotional rushes were fine as stories, but they really sang as poems. This time around, though, I’m not so thrilled. Bradbury’s Midwestern Baroque has twisted and decayed to become Nostalgic Mannerist.

The flights of linguistic fancy and wildly racing, enthusiastic shouts would work, but they overwhelm everything. Every character talks exactly like every other character–with long, wild rants that are probably meant to sound both homespun and wise but end up sounding like a precocious autodidact trying to show off what he has read. Every statement is an oracular speech, complete with wild imagery, copious italics, and plenty of exclamation points!!! Take this as an example: “Insane people give me hope,” one character says to the narrator. The narrator replies, “What!!!!” Now, okay, saying that insane people give you hope when you’re trying to track down some strange Beast who may be a murderer is a bit strange perhaps, but that response has at least three and probably four too many exclamations for my comfort. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy any of the characters or their feelings. I felt through the whole novel that it had been written by an alien who had heard of these things you strange humans call “emotions,” but had never actually experienced them. This alien then set out to write a “story” filled with “eccentric” characters who feel real “emotions.”

It is a bit disappointing to realize that one of my childhood idols is a hack and an alien one at that, but it does fit. It explains, for one thing, how Bradbury was able to write so well about Martians.