Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

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.