Bradburyworks - Bradbury Works

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.

While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

—Ray Bradbury

“Why haven’t I stopped to think and smell the last thirty years?”

— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

1970 cover art by Richard Clifton-Dey for The Small Assassin, by Ray Bradbury

comic adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Fog Horn

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.

-Ray Bradbury

There I strolled, lost in love, down the corridors, and through the stacks, touching books, pulling volumes out, turning pages, thrusting volumes back, drowning in all the good stuffs that are the essence of libraries. What a place, don’t you agree, to write a novel about burning books in the Future! —Ray Bradbury/Zen in the Art of Writing

Ray Bradbury - Dark Carnival. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948. First British edition. Octavo.

Art by Michael Ayrton.

Al Parker illustration for Ray Bradbury