When Ray Bradbury was still alive and I visited his home in west Los Angeles with regularity, I often took photos on the fly, simply to document the many mementos and metaphors. Below are two awards that sat on the bookcase in the living room. On the left is a lifetime achievement award presented by the University Women of the University of Judaism; on the right, Bradbury’s Grandmaster Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America.

It’s been eight years since the publication of my first biography of Ray Bradbury. The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury is finally available as an ebook. The new edition features ten new photographs, some never before seen, as well as a new epilogue chapter.

So Shadow Show scored the Bram Stoker Award for “Superior Achievement in an Anthology.” My collaborator Mort Castle and I could not be happier. We had an amazing time in New Orleans at the ceremony. Thanks to the Horror Writers Association for this tremendous honor. Wow! Here’s a picture of my beautiful (and heavy!) trophy.

(Photograph by Zen Sekizawa. November 30, 2009)



It is almost incomprehensible that it has been one year since Ray Bradbury died. I met the man when he was 79. I knew that one day he would die, as all of us most certainly do. Yet I’ve had so much trouble coming to terms with his absence. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve experienced more than my share of death and loss and hospital-room suffering. Tubes and IVs and morphine and tears. I knew the day would come when Ray Bradbury was no longer here. Still, I continue to grapple with it, my eyes struggling to focus through an incorrect lens.

I still don’t believe.

Ray Bradbury published his first story 29 years before I was born. He established himself as an international writer long before I arrived. When my mom was 9 months pregnant with me, my father read Bradbury aloud to her as I listened intently, in utero. And I later became his biographer. He always thought that sounded like one of his own stories.

For me—and so many others—he has always been.

And perhaps this is why it’s so damned hard to say good bye. Impossible, really. I read him every day. I think about him constantly. I teach him. I share his philosophies. I spread the gospel. I travel and speak and inspire new readers everywhere I go. I fight for libraries because he shared that love with me. He imbues my writing in every possible way. He loved my short stories and wanted me to be—no pressure—the next him. But more than all that, I had the privilege of regularly visiting Ray—hugging him, talking to him, reading to him, travelling with him—for 12 mind-boggling years. One day I will write a memoir about it all.

Here is a story I have never shared with anyone. He had a book that he was working on. Nightmares and Daydreams. It was incomplete. Unfinished. Raw. He regularly asked me to finish it for him. Every time I saw him, in fact. He knew I knew him better than anyone. He knew, at that point, I could almost write like him. He insisted I finish the book for him. His health was failing. He couldn’t do it. And he wanted this last book out there. But it wouldn’t have been right. I am not Ray Bradbury. I have never shared this story with anyone. Every time I saw him in the last two years of his life, he asked me to finish his book. I feel conflicted that I never helped him with this request, but his work should be his own, right until the end.

I think letting him go has been more difficult because of Mr. Electrico, the sideshow performer who, on a grey and gauzy Labor Day weekend, in 1932, told a young Ray Bradbury to “Live Forever!”

We all knew he wouldn’t. He knew he wouldn’t. Yet he has always been….

The Mr. Electrico story, told in glorious detail on pages 32-34 in Listen to the Echoes, was a metaphor, of course. Everything in Ray’s amazing life was a metaphor. He would “Live Forever” through his writing.

But I think in the deepest catacombs of my subconscious, against all logic, I wanted to believe that maybe he would Live Forever. Maybe, just maybe, the sideshow man—whoever he was—spoke truth. Ray Bradbury would never die. He would Live Forever. He would always be.

At the end of our regular telephone conversations, the two of us nearly 2,000 miles apart, he always said good bye the same way:

I miss you…and I love you.

I could not say it any better, my friend.

“A Sound of Thunder”



Where to Find It: The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Stories of Ray Bradbury

First Published: Colliers, June, 1952

Plot Synopsis: A group of adventurers travel back in time to hunt the most dangerous game—the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The caveat? Don’t mess with anything else. Dinosaurs will become extinct, the hunters are warned. Tamper with other things and, well, it’s called the “Butterfly Effect” for good reason.

Analysis: You write a short story about one of your great childhood loves. Dinosaurs. The story is a time-travelling thrill-ride with a description of the T-Rex that no CGI could ever come close to depicting. And when your story is done, your very premise of a time-travelling hunter stepping on a butterfly becomes part of our cultural vocabulary. AMAZING.

That Description of the T-Rex:

It came on great oiled, resilient legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers, its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit arena warily. Its beautifully reptile hands feeling the air.

Critique: “ A Sound of Thunder” is Bradbury at his speculative best. A perfect fusion of idea, language, description, and high entertainment, the story tackles the very premise of how mankind’s smallest actions can have universal implications.

Anecdote: When I would visit Ray at his home in Los Angeles, particularly in his later years when his health was waning, he would ask me to fetch books from his shelf and read them aloud.

“Read that paragraph from ‘A Sound of Thunder,” he often asked. “The one that describes the dinosaurs.”

And I would read the paragraph. When I was done and I’d look up at Ray, tears would be streaming down in his cheeks.

“I can’t believe I wrote that,” he said. “I am so grateful.”

In advance of a slew of speaking engagements I’m doing in Dallas, Texas this week, I wrote an essay for the Dallas Morning News addressing Ray Bradbury’s controversial comments in 2007 that his novel, Fahrenheit 451, was not about censorship.

I’m honored to report that Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury has been nominated for the prestigious 2013 Bram Stoker Award for “Superior Achievement in an Anthology.” This is my third Stoker nomination and I’m hopeful this time just may be the charm. Mort Castle, my co-editor on the book, has been been nominated nine times. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride! The awards ceremony will be held this coming June in New Orleans. Thanks to the members of the Horror Writers Association for this recognition.

(Artwork by Jenna Stempel)



Last week, on this very blog, I mentioned a short story I wrote about a trio of young friends who try to contact a deceased loved one by using a Quija Board. I must say I’m feeling mighty chuffed at the moment, as the story has just been published in the Chicago Reader’s prestigious annual “Pure Fiction” issue.

I wrote four stories that I considered using in Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury. At this point, all four stories have been published. “Night Summons” appeared in Rosebud #52; “The Shadows Behind the Trees” was made available on this website as a free PDF download (and it was also published on Byliner.com); and “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor” ran in Shadow Show.

Now, the fourth and final tale is out there. I hope you enjoy it.

2012 was a wonderful year. I can’t thank you enough for your support of Shadow Show and for all your lovely notes and comments about my own story in the book. I was also thrilled by your response to my Shadow Show outtake story, “The Shadows Behind the Trees,” which ran on this site. You can expect much more fiction from me in 2013, along with an ebook of The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury that will include a new chapter along with several new photos.

I am at work now on a novel that I hope to have wrapped by this time next year.

I send you all much love and well wishes for a beautiful new year.

Happy Holidays!

Sam

1). In his last years, Bradbury told me he intended to write a new science-fiction novel. He’d started on an idea about a group of Catholic cardinals who travel into the deeps of space to prove the existence of God.

2). Bradbury moved across genres. Did he ever write a Western? Yes. But he didn’t finish it. He started a short story about a “ghost horse” for film director John Huston.

3). For the yet-to-be-published collection Nightmares and Daydreams, Bradbury intended to use “Blue Shadow” by his friend Jean-Michel Folon as the cover art. A signed lithograph of this artwork hung in Bradbury’s den.

4). One of the last essays Bradbury wrote, through dictation to me, was a sweeping history of his career in urban design. The piece was titled “The Pomegranate Architect.”

5). Bradbury spoke often about his dreams of designing a Museum of Animation History for the Walt Disney Company. The entryway would be a long hallway with life-sized lenticular drawings of Disney characters lining the walls. The characters would walk down the hall with the tourists as they entered the building.