An email from Ray Bradbury. . .

Those familiar with Something Wicked This Way Comes may recognize my blog's title — A Manual of the Air Kingdoms — as one of the books Mr. Halloway finds in the Green Town library.

". . . to twelve stood a copy of Dr. Faustus, at two lay an Occult Iconography; at six, under Mr. Halloway's trailed fingers now, a history of circuses, carnivals, shadow shows, puppet menageries inhabited by mountebanks, minstrels, stilt-walking sorcerers and their fantoccini. More: A Manual of the Air Kingdoms (Things That Fly Down History). At nine sharp: By Demons Posessed, lying atop Egyptian Philtres. . . "
pg 196 Knopf 1983

As a Halloween kid (born premature 10/31/63), I've always felt a special attachment to SWTWC, as well as to Bradbury's other horror tales. For the length of my career I've wanted to write a novel about the summer/autumn of 1977, when I was thirteen going on fourteen, a kid blown sideways by the arrival of Star Wars, and also a crazed animator/special effects artist/filmmaker and sometime writer. It was only a few years ago that I realized that SWTWC would have to be my novel's armature, and moreso, that in my novel SWTWC would not exist as itself, but rather as a ghost of the nearly-made movie it was supposed to be.

October Dark tells an epic of Halloween, orbiting an unseen, unseeable film named Dark Carnival, whose 1957 production is tragically intertwined with a curse echoing down the entire history of the fantastic film, from the era of shadow shows in Pre-Revolutionary France, to the Phantasmagoria a century later, to the travails of inventor Willis H. O'Brien in the years before King Kong, and finally to the summer and autumn of 1977, when two Famous Monsters of Filmland fanatics named Will and Jim stumble onto secrets in the frames of their 8mm animated epics, and buried in the crypt beneath the faded cinema palace, where the secret history is reaching its terminal point.

Awhile back, I came to my senses and realized that, hey, I should probably contact Mr. Bradbury, and solicit his response to my writing a novel rather crazily inspired by his classic, which I was calling dark carnivals. Thanks to Pete Crowther my publisher at PS (and his good advice) I obtained the email address of Alexandra Bradbury, Ray's daughter (with whom Pete's working to produce a lovely series of special editions). I crafted a brief letter that sought to describe the plot of dark carnivals, as well as outline my earlier projects. I appended a string of positive reviews, from Kirkus to Starlog. I sent if off.

A few days later I received a reply; not from Alexandra but from Mr. Bradbury himself. The gist: he thanked me for telling him about the project, and his only request concerned the title; would it be possible to change it, since readers might confuse dark carnivals with his book Dark Carnival? I responded: Of course! And so dark carnivals is dead. Long live October Dark.

A recent letter

Dear Mr. Herter,

A few weeks ago, I chanced across a review of The Luminous Depths on the internet. Intrigued, I ordered the book through Abe.books, along with On The Overgrown Path. I have now read both books (twice) and cannot resist writing to tell you how greatly they intrigued and moved me. Partly, my strong response is probably due to the protagonists, Leos Janacek and Karel Capek. I have loved Janacek’s orchestral and piano music since I played some of the latter when I was a kid. And I remain a great fan of Capek’s War With The Newts, of which I have a battered, aged paperback edition I bought long ago and have re-read a few times. But mostly, your novellas captivate for the best of reasons: the stories they tell and the prose with which those stories are told.

Both books have about them an aura of mystery, the sublime (in the sense of awe), and the uncanny quite unlike anything I can remember reading. You manage to vividly, memorably evoke places and times quite unfamiliar, even before elements of the fantastic enter the scene. I regularly found myself re-reading long passages simply to savor the images they evoked and the prose itself.
. . .
I read in the review that you are seeking an American publisher for these books. I greatly hope you succeed. I can’t imagine these books not finding a receptive, reasonably broad audience here — perhaps at least or more-so among non-genre readers than among genre readers.
. . .

In any case, thank you so much for these marvelous works. I am eagerly looking forward to the third of these works, One Who Disappeared, and to whatever else you write in the future.

Michael
Michael A. Morrison
Dept. Physics & AstronomyUniversity of Oklahoma


I'd like to thank Dr.Morrison.