http://www.courierpress.com/news/2007/nov/02/fall-means-its-time-to-get-out-the-bradbury/

Fall means it's time to get out the Bradbury

By Good Morning Tri-State
Friday, November 2, 2007

This time of year the fantastic, even the macabre, side of fall seems to capture my imagination.

It's not that I like creepy things so much. I've never been a big fan of scary movies unless they involved Abbott and Costello or had an element of camp to them.

If I had to describe myself in relation to a season, I would say I'm a summer person. But something about a chill breeze, a big harvest moon, the death rattle of dry leaves blowing down the sidewalk and bare tree branches revealing themselves like emerging skeletons just starts the writer in me working.

Autumn's graveyard mojo is fertile creative ground.

If there is one writer who embodies all those things for me, it would have to be Ray Bradbury. Stephen King and Dean Koontz may lead the pack for popular "horror" writers, and I'm sure they could name a few inspiring writers too, but when it comes to nailing the spirit of that autumn feeling that always grabs my imagination, Bradbury is the only writer who comes close.

Since his earliest works, like the 1950s short story collection "The October Country," or classics such as "The Halloween Tree" and my personal favorite, "Something Wicked This Way Comes," Bradbury has mined the spookiness of autumn. Sometimes it is the actual setting, but often it is more of an implied feeling.

It's an inspired decision, if you can call it that. Probably, he had no choice. Bradbury has said has been writing every day since he was 12. That is an impressionable age. When I read his stories, I'm left with a strong impression that he has spent decades with a serious case of arrested development — in the best possible way. He has mined the same sources of childhood fascinations over and over (autumn, dinosaurs, space, life, death, youth and age) with a freshness that sidesteps nostalgia.

Instead, Bradbury uses the various facets of autumn — nostalgia, change, decay — like individual tools in his box of writer's tricks. The result is a body of work that has appeal to young and old alike.

There isn't just entertainment in Bradbury's work, there is wisdom.

— Mark Wilson464-7417or wilsonm@courierpress.com