Calm Weather and the Melancholy Tide
Recently, I got an inexpensive used copy of Twice Twenty-Two , a 1966 book made up of Ray Bradbury's story collections Golden Apples of the Sun (1953) and Medicine for Melancholy (1956) — the collections on either side of The October Country (1955). I've been revisiting Bradbury a bit over the last year or so. Though his stories were important to me when I was young, he's someone I hadn't read with any passion since childhood, thinking he was a writer whose childish spirit must not have much to say to me in adulthood. I was wrong. It may seem strange to say of someone who is so famous and beloved, but Bradbury is an easy writer to underestimate. We associate him with themes of childhood, with nostalgia, with sentimentality. And there is truth in those associations. But it was an essay by the wonderful horror writer Joel Lane (collected in This Spectacular Darkness ) that sent me back to Bradbury and convinced me that Bradbury's obsessive theme is less childhood t...