So like....where does Ray Bradbury fall on the cozy horror scale?
Because there's a coziness in the nostalgia of long ago Halloweens in The Halloween Tree.
There's a coziness in the Elliotts family, made up of monsters, ghouls, and one perfectly average boy, from The Dust Returned.
There are even cozy aspects in Something Wicked This Way Comes, that even when there's a dark carnival changing and warping people, William Halloway still finds comfort and reassurance in the presence of his father.
Bradbury sure knew how to make horror stories memorable and terrifying, and yet, some of them feel like a warm blanket on a chill, autumn night.
"And if you look" -- she nodded at the sky -- "there's a man in the moon." He hadn't looked for a long time.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Complete original artwork for “I, Rocket,” an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story by Al Feldstein (script), Al Williamson (pencils and inks), Frank Frazetta (inks), and Roy G. Krenkel (background pencils and inks) from Weird Fantasy #20, published by EC Comics, July 1953.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Ray Bradbury
"All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe."
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury, 1972
A Medicine for Melancholy, Ray Bradbury
“I’ll hold on to the world tight some day. I’ve got one finger on it now; that’s a beginning.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine (William Morrow Paperbacks; April 23, 2013) (via Cultural Offering)