Ray

On June 6, Ray Bradbury passed away.  He was one of the world's great writers, a master fantasist whose words enchanted millions of readers for more than half a century and will go on doing so for as long as people read.  People have been posting for days now about the importance of Bradbury, what he meant to them, their sadness at his passing.  When I sat down to write something about Bradbury, this is what my pen put on the paper.

   

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RAY

   

    "So what do we tell him about Ray?" Ellen asked me.

    "The truth, I suppose.  What else?"

    Jimmy's plane would land in a few hours and we would pick up our grandson and spend the next six weeks enjoying his presence and trying to keep up with a ten-year-old boy who never went anywhere at less than a dead run.

    But this summer there would be something missing.  There would still be the zoo and the fireworks on the Fourth of July, and the carnival that passed through town every summer and the late night drive out past the edge of town, out past the lights with the old telescope that I'd somehow kept since childhood, so that Jimmy could see Mars and Saturn's rings and the double star that was the middle of the Big Dipper's handle.  But part of the daily ritual was over now, because Ray Spaulding had died this week.

    Ellen said, "I don't think he knows anyone who's gone, does he?"

    "No, not that I know of."  Our grandson, at ten, had not yet been touched by death.  He had not yet lost a pet or a friend or a family member.  The people important to him were still in their proper places.  Death was something he knew only from movies and stories, from the occasional roadside animal struck down by traffic -- it was an abstraction, a concept only.  But this summer it would become real for him because Ray Spaulding was gone.

    Ray Spaulding was a writer; he'd written fantasy and science fiction since the late 1940s, he was famous in his field though not widely known outside of it, and he was still active though not at anything like the pace of forty or fifty years ago.  He'd grown up near here and had moved back a few years ago, the same summer that Jimmy's annual visits had begin.

    Jimmy had never known his father, and his mother, though devoted to him, had to work.  While she spent her evenings and weekends with him, a chunk of that time was eaten by necessary household chores.  The company she worked for had inventory and other end-of-year processes late each June, so a few years back, we'd started keeping him for six weeks in the summer.  Ellen and I were retired, and while we were slowing down, we were still able to do things with him, like the zoo and the carnival.

    One afternoon that first summer, as Jimmy played in the sprinkler on the front lawn, he ran through the spray and then kept going, out of our yard and into the next, stopping at our new neighbor's front steps, and I heard him say, "Hi.  I'm Jimmy.  What's your name?"

    Ray Spaulding sat in a chair on his front porch, enjoying the summer sun and smiling at the soaking wet seven-year-old boy.  "I'm Ray.  Do you live near here?"

    I caught up to Jimmy.  "The grandson," I said.  "We've got him for six weeks."

    "Good for you," Ray said.  Then he looked at Jimmy again.  "So.  Jimmy, is it?  What do you like to do?"

Some kids are shy; Jimmy was not one of them.  And what he liked to do burst out of him, the words tripping over each other in Jimmy's rush to answer Ray Spaulding's question.  The words poured forth so quickly that Ellen and I could hardly understand everything Jimmy was saying.  But Ray didn't seem to have any trouble with the torrent, and while Ray was old now and visibly frail there was in his eyes as he looked at our grandson more than a touch of the child he once must have been, the child that perhaps he had never forgotten how to be.

    And for the next hour, Jimmy and Ray talked about dinosaurs and magic tricks and comic books and Halloween and ghosts and what might be on the dark side of the moon.  Whatever Jimmy brought up, Ray seemed to know of it.  Ellen and I were old, and so was Ray -- he was older than we were by perhaps twenty years -- but Ellen and I thought of ourselves as old now, and standing there listening to Ray and Jimmy it seemed that Ray could never have thought of himself as old, had kept his sense of endless youth through all the decades of his life.

    Some time spent talking with Uncle Ray became part of the daily ritual for Jimmy during his summer visits.  Every day, at some point, of a morning or afternoon, or sometimes after dark with the moon full and the fireflies challenging Jimmy to catch them as they winked at him on the front lawn, he would sit and talk a while with Ray Spaulding.  And later, Ellen and I would find ourselves with Jimmy at the bookshop or the library, getting a copy of Treasure Island or Oliver Twist or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and we would read to him at night until he fell asleep.  Some of the words in these books had to be going right by him, but Ray had told him enough about the stories that he listened, rapt, the whole time.  One afternoon, after he'd talked about dinosaurs with Ray, Jimmy asked us about two movies, and we took him to the video store and found copies of the original King Kong and The Lost World.  Jimmy was spellbound by them, and so were we; neither Ellen nor I had seen those movies in decades.

    On Jimmy's next visit, he was still happy to spend time with Ellen and me, but the main attraction for him was the chance to spend some time with Ray Spaulding.  Ray told him of things we would never have remembered to tell him, things we might not have thought important enough to pass on.  Ellen and I could remember the trains that had run so often between the lonely prairie towns where we'd grown up -- Ray remembered the smell of the coal-fired engines, lingering for a while in the hot still air of summer after the trains had passed by.  We could remember that we'd run and played in woods that seemed, when we were ten or eleven, to go on for miles even though they were probably not nearly as deep as we thought -- Ray remembered those woods and he remembered the tree-houses that our parents had never seen, remembered nights spent in high branches or in tents in clearings with ghost stories accompanied by the moaning of lonely night winds and the glow of eyes just beyond the reach of firelight.  We could speak of some of these things to our grandson, but Ray knew them.  To us they were memories, fading as we ourselves were beginning to fade -- Ray knew them as if he were still the child to whom they were all as new as today's sunrise.  To us they were dead leaves pressed in scrapbooks, but to him everything from all those years gone by was fresh and alive and flowing from him to Jimmy, and Ellen and I couldn't begin to express how much we envied him that gift, that capacity to capture all those details from all those decades and pass them on apparently so effortlessly.

    Gone now.  And we knew that we were going to miss Ray Spaulding as much as Jimmy would.  While we didn't see him every day when Jimmy wasn't here, we would see him sitting out on his front porch at least two or three evenings a week in good weather, and spend a little time talking with him.  We found him as captivating as our grandson did, and if Ray found us as dull and stodgy as we thought we must be in comparison, he never let on.

    And now we had to tell Jimmy that he wouldn't be seeing Ray any more.

    There had been no time to prepare him for it, no time to call and let his mother break the news.  We'd been away for ten days, visiting friends in Phoenix, and Ray had a stroke and died the night we'd left and by the time we got back home the night before Jimmy's arrival, it was all over.  The family had made the arrangements, Ray had been buried next to his wife in Eugene, Oregon, and Ray's son and daughter were going through paperwork and possessions as they prepared to close up and sell the house, and we didn't realize what had happened until this morning and Jimmy was already on his way here.

    When we picked him up at the airport, he was already bursting.  He was ready for the zoo, of course, and the telescope, and the Fourth's fireworks, and all the things he wanted to tell Uncle Ray and all the things he wanted to ask Uncle Ray.  As we pulled into the driveway, he immediately noticed the two cars parked in front of Ray's house and asked who was visiting.  We went inside and sat in the front room.  We didn't know how to tell him, so we just told him.  "Jimmy," I said, "Mr. Spaulding died last week.  He's gone, son."

    No tears, just silence and a look of solemnity that seemed to me beyond a child's capacity.  Then Jimmy said, "He said that might happen because he was old and he was sick.  But he never seemed old."  He was silent again for a few moments.  "Will we visit his grave?" he asked.

    "I'm afraid not.  His grave's quite a long way from here."

    Nobody said anything then, and finally Ellen and I said almost in unison, "Are you hungry after your trip?"

    Jimmy said he was, and we fixed ham sandwiches and lemonade and took them out on the front porch.  The porch swing and the trees gave us shade for now but the sun and the clear sky promised heatstroke weather by late afternoon.  We talked a little as we ate, talked of inconsequentialities, about anything but Ray Spaulding.

    We were almost finished with lunch when the front door of Ray's house opened and Ray's son and daughter, Dennis and Barbara, stepped out.  They noticed us and waved, and then stepped back inside.  When they emerged again, Dennis was carrying a box.  They came to our porch, smiling.

    Dennis said, "I'm thinking that you'd be Jimmy.  Am I right?"

    Jimmy nodded, and Dennis continued, "Well, Mr. Spaulding was our father, and he told us about seeing you here the last few summers.  Did your grandparents tell you what happened?"

    "Yes."

    "We're going to be around another couple of days, going through things."  He hefted the box and smiled more broadly at Jimmy, and I was struck by how much he resembled his father -- something in his eyes, and much of that resemblance was there in Barbara's eyes too.  "Our dad said he'd been telling you about books and other things, and we think he'd have liked you to have these."  He put the box down next to the front door.  "Maybe your grandparents will read these to you later.  Okay, Jimmy?"

    "Okay."

    To us, he said, "We'll be in and out of here the next couple of days -- we'll stop by before we lock the place up and leave, if that's all right."

    "Of course."

    And they were off, and in a little while we went inside, bringing the box with us.  Jimmy made no move to open it, and neither did we.  It was the last he had of Uncle Ray and he was in no hurry to use it up.  He didn't open the box that day or the next, and we didn't say anything about it.  I'm not sure that we really wanted to see it opened either.

    Years ago, after the death of my father, I ended up in possession of a box of his things.  There were half a dozen of his favorite books, the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart he'd won during World War II, some photographs of people I didn't recognize, and a packet of letters he'd received from a few of his army buddies as well as some letters he'd send them, returned to him after their deaths I suppose, and some newspaper clippings of obituaries.  Without Dad present, these objects had seemed like simply debris from his life, cast-off things already crumbling to dust.

    We wondered if Jimmy somehow felt that opening his gift from Ray would let whatever remained of him escape into final oblivion, leaving only a box of discarded toys that would one day seem like clutter rather than holy relics.  Maybe Jimmy was afraid to open the box; I'm sure that I was.

    Two days after Dennis and Barbara had given Jimmy the package, they knocked on our door to let us know they were leaving.  "We'd like to tell you again how much Dad enjoyed your grandson's visits," Barbara said.  "And your company as well."

    Dennis was looking at Jimmy.  "Did you like your package?" he said.

    "I didn't open it yet," Jimmy told him.

    Dennis didn't seem surprised by that, and I thought that somehow he knew just what Jimmy thought would happen if he opened the box, that he also knew what I'd felt about my father's things.

    "He read stories to you, didn't he, Jimmy?" Dennis said.  Jimmy nodded and Dennis continued.  "He read to us too.  All the time.  He read to us from Dickens and Verne and Wells and Melville and Poe and Burroughs.  He read us short stories and whole novels and poetry.  He read us books that we couldn't have fully understood or appreciated at our age, but it was clear that he loved the things he read us, so clear that we loved them too.  But he always read to us from other writers; he never read us his own stories.  When we were your age or a little older, he showed us the books he wrote, just to let us know they were there.  He knew that we'd read them some day because they were his, but in the meantime there were all these other writers he wanted us to meet."

    Jimmy, still silent, looked from Dennis to the box.

    "When Dad was a little bit older than you," Dennis said, "he went to a carnival, and one of the carnival people told him to live forever.  And he will, as long as people read what he wrote."

    "Is that what's in the box?  His books?" Jimmy said.

    "And some others, but yes, his books are there.  When you feel like you're ready, open the box and read them.  He wrote them for you."

    Dennis stood and looked at me and Ellen.  "We'll be going now.  It was nice meeting all of you."

    "And you both," Ellen said.  "And again, our sympathies."

    Barbara said goodbye to Jimmy, and moments later they were gone, leaving an empty house next door and a package, waiting to be opened, on the coffee table.

    Jimmy stepped to the coffee table and opened the box; he began removing the contents, stacking the paperbacks and comics neatly on the table as he did, and stacking Ray's titles separately.  He picked one of Ray's titles from the stack and handed it to me.  "Grandpa, will you read me this one?"

    "Sure."

    We sat on the sofa, Jimmy between me and Ellen, and I opened the book and began to read:  "First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys."

    And I kept reading, as enthralled as my grandson, long into the warm summer night.

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Note: Ray Spaulding, of course, is and is not Ray Bradbury.  Spaulding is unknown outside the genre, while Bradbury was world-famous.  Spaulding returns to live a few of his last years in the area where he'd been a boy, while Bradbury did not.  Spaulding has a son and a daughter; Bradbury had four daughters and I have no idea what stories he read to them.  Both Spaulding and Bradbury loved books and reading, and both had retained the sense of wonder they'd had in boyhood, and both had been able to communicate that wonder to readers of all ages.  The book that the narrator begins reading to Jimmy at the end of the story is Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes; if you haven't read it, or The Martian Chronicles, or The Illustrated Man, or The October Country, or Dandelion Wine, or so many of his others, you're cheating yourself.

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Wish I'd Written That...

Not long ago, Terry Teachout posted a list of the ten American novels and the ten American plays he would most like to have written.  Patrick Kurp followed up with a few comments and a list of his own.  There was some overlap, but not as much as you might expect.

Terry Teachout's list is at http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2012/02/tt_allamerican.html and you can find Patrick Kurp's response at http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2012/02/purely-personal-inventory.html

It's been said that we can't know how even our closest friends experience music (can't recall who said that -- may have run across the comment in one of Joseph Epstein's essays...) -- sometimes I wonder if the same isn't true of the experience of art in general, of film and photography and fiction and all the rest.  The novel that I find trite and mawkish may move you beyond your capacity to express; the poem that I find heartbreakingly sad may leave you wondering just when I lost whatever critical faculties I may once have had.

It's also been said that the act of drawing up such "wish I'd written that" lists exposes you to the sneer of the critic, professional or otherwise, who looks over the list and says, "You like that?"

But drawing up such lists is a lot of fun.

So, in no particular order, here are some novels, short stories, and poems I wish I'd written.

William Goldman: The Princess Bride; Boys and Girls Together
Don Robertson: Praise the Human Season; Mystical Union
Theodore Sturgeon: "The Girl Who Knew What They Meant;" "Hurricane Trio;" "A Saucer of Loneliness"
Robert Heinlein: The Puppet Masters
Robert Silverberg: Dying Inside; The Book of Skulls; Thorns
Joe Haldeman: 1968
Stephen King: "The Body;" Hearts in Atlantis
John D. MacDonald: The Damned; "End of the Tiger;" The Executioners; The End of the Night
Evan Hunter: Sons; Far from the Sea; Love, Dad
Joseph Epstein: "The Goldin Boys"
Roger Zelazny: "A Rose for Ecclesiastes"
Donald Justice: "Men at Forty;" "The Tourist from Syracuse"
Dana Gioia: "Summer Storm;" "Unsaid"
Harlan Ellison: "Paladin of the Lost Hour;" "Shatterday;" "The Function of Dream Sleep;" "Jeffty Is Five"
Ray Bradbury: "Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby Is a Friend of Mine;" "The Town Where No One Got Off"

That list is by no means exhaustive -- there's plenty more to be added to it, and it changes, and you'll have noticed it doesn't get into Hemingway/Fitzgerald/etc country at all (but, really, who wouldn't want to have written Gatsby or "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"?)

One nice thing about running across lists like those of Teachout and Kurp is that you run across titles that you'd not heard of, or you're reminded of titles you'd meant to read but had simply forgotten to make note of.  But that also means that your to-be-read pile gets even bigger -- I don't know how you're doing with your TBR pile, but I don't expect to live long enough to finish mine, so I should know better than to look at such lists.  But I look at them anyway.  So if you've got a list of your own, pass it along or post a link in the comments; I'm always happy to put a few more titles on The Amazing Colossal To-Be-Read Pile.

Late to the Party Department: Robert McCammon's novel Boy's Life is a terrific read.  If, like me, you'd missed it, grab a copy immediately.  If you like Bradbury, or King's "The Body," or Dan Simmons's Summer of Night, you'll enjoy Boy's Life.  My thanks to Kealan Patrick Burke and the gang at his Goodreads group for steering me to this one.


And a brief commercial: I've got a new short story up at Amazon's Kindle store called "Saturdays That Might Have Been;" it's a short fantasy with (I hope) something of a Jack Finney/Twilight Zone feel to it.  It's free from May 11 through May 13, after which it goes back to 99 cents.  Give it a look if you get a chance and while the price is right.

A Few More Horror Recommendations

If you read ebooks, it's a nice time to be a fan of good supernatural and horror fiction.  There have been first-rate small presses devoted to the genre for a long time, and some of them are making backlist and new titles available in digital editions at reasonable prices.

Cemetery Dance is an excellent publisher of horror fiction; even if the house wasn't publishing good new material, such as their limited edition hardcover of Kealan Patrick Burke's Kin and the new ebook A Life in Cinema by Mick Garris, CD would deserve kudos for issuing the ebook edition of Kirby McCauley's 1980 anthology Dark Forces.  Dark Forces was a big collection of original horror stories done by some of the field's top names along with entries by writers not usually associated with the genre at the time such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Joyce Carol Oates.  This collection contained the original appearance of Stephen King's "The Mist," and also included work by Theodore Sturgeon, Russell Kirk, and Dennis Etchison.  It's an excellent collection and it's available at a bargain price -- only $6.99 in the Kindle store.

Also active in ebooks these days is Ash-Tree Press.  Ash-Tree is a Canadian publisher specializing in the classic ghost story, epitomized by the work of M. R. James.  One of Ash-Tree's offerings is A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings of M. R. James, which includes all of his ghost stories and his essays on supernatural fiction.  Ash-Tree is also in the process of releasing six collections that will include all the ghost stories of E. F. Benson.  If you've not read Benson's work, check out the text of his short story "Caterpillars;" after you've read that one, you'll want more.  Ash-Tree is also offering work by H. Russell Wakefield, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others.

And publishers such as Necon, Samhain Publishing, and Macabre Ink have issued novels and short story collections by writers such as Alan Peter Ryan, Ramsey Campbell, Charles L. Grant, Jack Ketchum, Thomas Tessier, John Skipp and Craig Spector, Al Sarrantonio, Richard Christian Matheson and plenty more.

There are a number of good writers who are simply putting the work out there on their own.  A nice example here is the series of Penny Dreadnought collections offering stories by James Everington, Iain Rowan, Aaron Polson, and Alan Ryker; three of these are out so far, and each contains a story by each of the four contributors. 

There's plenty for the horror fan to choose from in the way of novels and short story collections.  But what about the big anthologies?  The ones that could serve as textbooks for a good classroom survey course in the genre?  The best-known representative anthologies are probably the Modern Library anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural and David Hartwell's The Dark Descent.  Both are excellent collections, and chances are any lover of the horror story owns one or both.  A more recent representative collection is the big 2-volume The Century's Best Horror Fiction edited by John Pelan and published by Cemetery Dance; this one's expensive, priced at $150 for the set, but the selection of stories is terrific.  None of these are available as ebooks, unfortunately.

If you want a good representative anthology of the weird tale in ebook form, your best bet at the moment is probably The Weird edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.  This one isn't from a small press; it's published by Tor/Macmillan, and at first glance it may seem a bit pricey for an ebook at $14.99, but it includes stories selected from a century's work in the genre, like Pelan's two-volume collection (and while there's some overlap in the selections, there's not very much).  Among the 110 stories are Fritz Leiber's "Smoke Ghost," Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good LIfe," Robert Bloch's "The Hungry House," Saki's "Sredni Vashtar," Charles Beaumont's "The Howling Man," George R. R. Martin's "Sandkings," and Harlan Ellison's "The Function of Dream Sleep."  The lineup of authors includes Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Poppy Z. Brite, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, and more   Pricey?  For a package this nice, $14.99 is a steal.





Links to some of the titles recommended above (links are to the U.S. Amazon Kindle store):
The Weird
A Pleasing Terror: the Complete Supernatural Writings of M. R. James
Dark Forces
"Caterpillars, by E. F. Benson"
The Penny Dreadnought Collections

A Writer Who Can Do It All

At KindleBoards.com in the Book Corner section, one of the denizens started a thread devoted to the question, "What are your top 5 books of all time?"

Normally, I hate that question, for a few reasons -- never been able to understand how anybody could actually rank his favorites in such a way to come up with an absolute top 5 of all time, never been able to understand why anybody could actually WANT to rank them that way, and (worst of all) never been able to NOT think about the question when it's asked.  So instead of goofing off, or working, or doing battle with the novel-in-progress, I found myself thinking about my top 5 books of all time.

No, I don't have a solid now-and-forever top 5.  Given enough time and skull sweat I might be able to come up with a top 10 list in a number of different categories: top 10 thrillers, top 10 science fiction and fantasy novels, top 10 horror novels, top 10 general/mainstream/literary/call-it-what-you-like.  But I don't have those lists and I'm not going to clutter up the evening trying to build them -- an hour after I did so, I'd be kicking myself for leaving off this title or that one and then I'd have to build the lists all over again.  That way lies madness.

But while thinking about the question, it did occur to me that there's someone who'd rank in the top 10 in multiple categories.  Fantasy, thriller, mystery and suspense, general/literary, non-fiction.  As far as novel-writing goes, he's fallen silent; he's devoted most of his time to screenwriting and script doctoring for quite a while now.

The writer is William Goldman.

You know his work.  Even if you don't recognize his name (unlikely), you're bound to have seen at least one of the movies he's written.  Adaptations of books by other writers (including Misery, Hearts in Atlantis, All the President's Men, Absolute Power, A Bridge Too Far), original scripts of his own (The Great Waldo Pepper, The Ghost and the Darkness, Year of the Comet, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), and adaptations of his own books (Marathon Man, Magic, and The Princess Bride).

Goldman's novels include: The Temple of Gold; Boys and Girls Together; No Way to Treat a Lady; Soldier in the Rain; The Thing of It Is...; Marathon Man; Magic; The Princess Bride; Heat; Control; Tinsel; Brothers; The Color of Light.  And he's written non-fiction as well, including Adventures in the Screen Trade and Hype and Glory.

Look at that list (if you don't know the novels but only the movies look at the list of originals and adaptations of his own work) and think about the range of it.  The Princess Bride is a wonderful comic fantasy.  Marathon Man is, in my opinion, the finest thriller of the 70s.  Magic is a chilling psychological horror story.  Tinsel is a big Hollywood novel.  Control and Brothers (a sequel to Marathon Man) are both thrillers with science fiction elements woven in.  No Way to Treat a Lady is a nifty mystery/suspense story.  And the others, like The Temple of Gold and Boys and Girls Together -- non-genre fiction of a high order.

How high an order?  Let me put it this way: Salinger's Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye always struck me as too much of a literary construct; Goldman's Ray Trevitt from The Temple of Gold seemed far more real to me.  Goldman could take a character like Aaron Firestone in Boys and Girls Together, a character who gets less sympathetic with every scene he's in, and make you cry for him.  Goldman could write scenes that chill your blood and almost make you laugh out loud at the same time, in books like Marathon Man and Magic.  (And if there's a novelist anywhere who can handle scenes involving insecurity or humiliation better than Goldman, I don't know who it is.)  Some people said that some of his later novels didn't measure up to the earlier ones, and for me Heat and Brothers weren't in the same class as their predecessors -- but even those books were so engagingly written that I never once felt I hadn't gotten more than my money's worth (and I didn't wait for the paperbacks -- grabbed them in hardcover on the day of release).  Some of Goldman's books may not have been in the same league as others of his titles, but that's the way it works for every writer -- Budd Schulberg once likened a writer's work to a mountain range and noted that not every peak is Everest.  I can't recall ever reading a page of Goldman that I found dull; dull may just be the only thing Goldman can't write.

If you know William Goldman's work only from his screenwriting (dynamite though that is), treat yourself to some of his fiction.  You won't be disappointed.  You may find yourself with somebody to add to your own top 10 list.


UPDATE: Dec 20, 2012.  On January 8, three of Goldman's best novels, The Temple of Gold, Marathon Man, and Boys and Girls Together, will finally be released as ebooks in Amazon's Kindle store.  The ebook editions will be coming from Open Road Media, a house that tends to release all or most of its authors' available backlist -- here's hoping that the rest of Goldman's novels will soon follow.

That's Not a Real Book and in a Few Years You Won't Be Able to Read It Anyway

Ray Bradbury finally in ebook?  Well, not all of Bradbury, unfortunately, but at least a major title as opposed to a couple of short stories.  Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury's classic of a society in which firemen burn books, has finally been made available for the Kindle.  It's welcome news for those who, like me, saw his comment at the end of his Paris Review interview a while back -- as I recall, he said that he'd answered offers regarding ebook releases with an emphatic "Go to hell." -- and assumed that his major work would never be made available in digital editions.

Naturally, there have been disapproving comments in some circles, suggesting that the release of Fahrenheit 451 in ebook form is somehow a betrayal of the book.  It isn't, of course; there isn't a reason in the world why there can't be both print and digital editions of Bradbury's work.  Or anyone else's for that matter.

But one of the objections occasionally brought up regarding ebooks is that literary treasures would vanish if they exist only in digital format, that books cannot be entrusted to the computer.

Well, yes and no.

If an ebook never appears in a printed edition, is published only in digital form and then only in one or two formats, and is never migrated to new formats as new formats are developed, then that title runs the risk of being lost.  But exactly how does that differ from the case of a print title released by its publisher to little fanfare and never reissued after the original printing is sold out or remaindered?  Eventually the supply of used copies runs out, the libraries withdraw their copies if they aren't circulating quickly enough, and finally that title is facing oblivion just as surely as its digital counterpart.

There are the inevitable you-don't-need-to-recharge-a-real-book comments, the laments over the weight and feel and even the smell of the physical object.  And no question, a well-designed and printed physical book is a delight.  But not an unalloyed delight.  Take Stephen King's 11/22/63; that's one good-sized item, and these days I find it difficult to hold a book that size, and I doubt I'm alone -- the Kindle edition is a godsend.

The notion that's inevitably raised, though, and in tones that suggest that THIS is the unanswerable argument, is the fact that so many old computer files are no longer readable.  And for some files created in early operating systems, before there were computers on nearly every desktop in the known universe, that's true.  But, for instance, on my desktop PC in my home I have files created 15 or 20 years ago on other machines, files that I moved with no difficulty as I upgraded, files created in software programs that I no longer use or own, files that I can now open in other programs if need be.  I don't believe I'm unique this way, but I'm small-time, and not looking at trying to make sure my files survive for a century or more.  Does anyone seriously think that as publishers go digital they won't consider storage of their titles in formats that can be easily migrated?  That there will be no libraries or other archives working on automated migration procedures?  (I'm assuming here that publishers are rational beings wishing to preserve valuable assets for the future, though a number of them still don't seem at all comfortable with digital material yet.)  Or that writers won't do the same with their own work?

Take a look at Smashwords.  Every ebook published there can be made available in multiple formats as specified by the author; those formats include plain text and rich text format, both of which can be read by any word processor, and HTML which can be read with any web browser.  The ebooks created there can be run through conversion programs like Calibre and saved in other ebook formats as well.  Unless the EMP attack happens (in which case we'll have more pressing problems anyway), there shouldn't be any reason to worry about those files.  Copies should be available for as long as anyone cares to maintain them.

Now, that's Smashwords, where the authors publish their own titles, and no DRM is used.  Most commercial publishers still insist on DRM, which is meant to make sure that you can't move your ebook to any but approved devices, to make sure that you don't take your copy of the file and run it through a conversion program to create a copy for your Kindle if you change from a B&N Nook or vice versa.  The ebooks crippled with DRM are the ones you may not be able to read later if the seller goes out of business or you switch from one ebook reader to another -- that's not some unavoidable limitation of a computer-generated file, rather it's a deliberate attempt by the publisher to make certain the file can't be read elsewhere easily.

DRM strikes me as something that would increase the risk of digital extinction for the ebooks so burdened, most of which are from the same publishers who are happy to discontinue print versions that don't sell enough to justify keeping them available.  But that's a subject for another time.

***

Elsewhere on the backlist scene:

While Fahrenheit 451 is the big news backlist ebook title recently, there are other publishers busily reissuing older titles as ebooks

Bloomsbury Reader has recently issued more than a dozen titles by V. S. Pritchett.  Pritchett was probably best known for his short stories and reviews, but he also wrote biographies of Balzac, Turgenev, and Chekhov, travel books, novels, and two autobiographical works.  Much of his work is out of print in the US and his reappearance in ebook formats here is good news.  If you've not read Pritchett, you can get a nice sampling of his work in the Bloomsbury Reader edition of The Other Side of a Frontier or in Modern Library's The Pritchett Century (the latter a bit more pricey than the Bloomsbury title, though with some different selections -- this one is available both in print and ebook form).  Bloomsbury is also reissuing titles by Ronald Clark, Storm Jameson, Alec Waugh, and others.

MysteriousPress.com is working with Open Road to reissue backlist titles by a number of mystery writers, among them James Ellroy, Donald Westlake, and soon, Brian Garfield.  Garfield is probably best known for Death Wish; that title will be forthcoming along with other excellent thrillers like Hopscotch, Recoil, and Fear in a Handful of Dust.  It'll be nice to see them back.  Open Road has been very active on backlist over the past year, releasing titles by Stanley Elkin, Andre Dubus, Natalie Goldberg,  Lawrence Block, and more.

Good stuff coming, but there's a lot more good material waiting for revival.  Faster, please.

A Few Treats for Halloween

Halloween's less than a week away.  Turner Classic Movies has been running a nice selection of horror films on Mondays this month, and on Halloween the channel will run a day of Hammer horror films and top off the evening with the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, THE HAUNTING, and THE INNOCENTS, as well as an hour with Stephen King talking about horror films.

But there's plenty of horror to be found on the printed page too.  In case you've missed them, you might want to check out some of the following short story collections.  Why short stories?  Well, we drop bite-size treats into the kids' Halloween bags when they come to the door -- same principle. 

There's no real need to remind anyone to check out the work of Stephen King or Ray Bradbury or Shirley Jackson this time of year.  If you've missed King's collection NIGHT SHIFT or Bradbury's THE OCTOBER COUNTRY, or Jackson's THE LOTTERY, you're cheating yourself.  But unless you're a devoted fan of horror year-round and not just on Halloween, you may have missed some of the following.

NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS, by Fritz Leiber.  The first collection by the writer who brought the tale of supernatural horror into the modern urban setting.  Try for one of the later editions that includes the classic chiller "The Girl with Hungry Eyes."  The later collections SMOKE GHOST and THE BLACK GONDOLIER include several of the stories from NIGHT'S BLACK AGENTS as well as newer and equally chilling pieces.

DUEL, and NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 FEET, by Richard Matheson; and THE HOWLING MAN, by Charles Beaumont.  You know their work even if you don't recognize their names.  Matheson is the author of I AM LEGEND, SOMEWHERE IN TIME, THE SHRINKING MAN and others.  Beaumont and Matheson were responsible for many of the original TWILIGHT ZONE's most memorable episodes, and these three collections are perfect Halloween reading for any fan of that series.

Classic supernatural fiction can be found free in ebook form these days.  M. R. James's GHOST STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY, for instance, or stories by E. F. Benson, Oliver Onions, Algernon Blackwood and others are available at the Kindle store or at sites like horrormasters.com.

There are several excellent treasuries of horror stories available; anyone looking for terrific Halloween reading should find a copy of the Modern Library collection GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL, and David Hartwell's THE DARK DESCENT.  Both are nice survey collections, spanning the history of short horror fiction from its early days through modern times, and Hartwell's (the newer of the two) offers work by contemporary writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, and Charles Grant. 

I've mentioned Kealan Patrick Burke and James Everington in this space before; their collections THE 121 TO PENNSYLVANIA and THE OTHER ROOM (by Burke & Everington respectively) are highly recommended for the season as well.  In particular, Burke's "Empathy" is one of the most frightening short stories I've read in years. 

Enjoy.





Brief commercial:
I've put five short stories into a collection called FIVE OF THE HAUNTED.  The stories ("The Point," "The Old Neighborhood," "The Back Row of the Balcony," "Passenger," and "Anonymity") are all available separately at Amazon's Kindle store, Smashwords, and other retailers at 99 cents each.  FIVE OF THE HAUNTED gathers them into one ebook at the bargain price of $1.50.  Give it a look if you get a chance.

The Digital Divide Just Got a Bit Narrower

    Much of the buzz surrounding the announcements of Amazon's new Kindle devices is understandably focused on the tablet device, the $199 Kindle Fire.  Overlooked a bit is the low-end model, a bare-bones wi-fi ready, e-ink screen Kindle that can be had for as little as $79.  A decent pair of Nikes will set you back more than that.
    For as little as that, you get an electronic bookcase that can hold more than a thousand ebooks.
    Of course, there's still the matter of content.  Getting the books to put in the bookcase will cost plenty, though, right?  Well, that's true if the content you want consists of new books.  But think for a minute about content that isn't current.
    One of the country's premier liberal arts colleges is St. John's, with campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe.  It's known as The Great Books College -- every student goes through the same curriculum, and the reading list is a demanding one.  For a look at the list go to http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/academic/readlist.shtml
    The education you'd get at a college like St. John's will come from class discussion of the readings as well as from the books themselves, but the readings form the heart of it.
    Just for fun, pick some titles from the reading list and search for them in the Amazon Kindle store; sort the results of your searches by price-low-to-high.  You'll find that there are free editions available for quite a few of these titles.  If you search for the contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World set (54 volumes in its earlier edition, and 60 volumes in the more recent incarnation; for a list of titles included go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World), you'll find a number of the titles included in that set also have free editions available in the Kindle store.  A search for many of the books listed in titles like How to Read a Book or The Lifetime Reading Plan, or included in sets like the Harvard Classics, will also show a number of free editions.
    Not that long ago, building a home library of the classics would mean shelling out for sets like the Great Books, or purchasing a large number of paperbacks from the Penguin Classics (or Signet, or Bantam, or Modern Library), or scrounging for the titles you wanted in used book shops and library sale tables.  The process would still set you back hundreds of dollars, and maybe a thousand or more, or cost you a long time searching for your books in second-hand sources.  It's possible now to gather a lot of that material in a weekend with an under-$100 ebook reader.
    We've hit the point where almost anyone who really wants to can have available for study at his own pace most of the core titles of western civilization, for about what you'd pay for a pair of running shoes.  That's not the same as actually getting the reading done, of course, but the material just became even more widely accessible than it already was.  A few weeks back, I posted some comments about Cornelius Hirschberg's book on independent learning The Priceless Gift; Hirschberg's account of his own self-education is must reading for the lifelong learner, and the methods he used (as well as quite a few of the books he used) are still appropriate for use today.  If memory serves, Hirschberg died in 1995 so he didn't live to see the ebook revolution really get under way, but I'd bet he would have loved it.


Brief commercial: I've put another short story, "Passenger," up at Amazon and Smashwords (from where it should find its way to Sony, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble some time soon).  Give it a look if you get a chance.