The Stephen King - Ray Bradbury Paradox

In 2009, I had the pleasure to perform in a stage version of Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, under the direction of Pillar of Fire co-founder Terry Pace, who co-founded Pillar of Fire Productions with the legendary writer Ray Bradbury. I have read Stephen King’s praise of Bradbury for many years since Danse Macabre (1981). King has long contributed Bradbury’s work as being inspiration for his own stories. It may be confusing to understand how a man who helped create and mold the genre of science fiction and fantasy had such an influence on the man who would become the ‘Master of Horror’. However, as I was preparing for the show, I began seeing these small references within Bradbury’s words that instantly made me think of Stephen King’s work.

The October Country (1955) is a collection of nineteen macabre stories by Bradbury, while the stage version incorporated four short stories. The story that held the most significant connection, for me, between Bradbury and King was “Cistern,” which was the creepiest and scariest of the four plays that we performed. “Cistern” is a story about two sisters, one who appears to be emotionally disturbed and obsessed with the sewers and what is in them. Every Stephen King aficionado understands the importance of the sewer in certain pieces of his work.

While watching the two very lovely and talented actors rehearsing their lines, I was able to see what an influence that this one Bradbury short had on a popular Stephen King novel. Some of the lines refer to the “people living in the sewers” and persons “floating” beneath the grates. This single concept of people in the sewers, which every child has probably imagined when walking past a sewer grate on the streets, became the concept for Stephen King’s novel, IT (1986).

The parallels between King and Bradbury do not end there. King has contributed Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) as being the author’s “best work.” He describes it in Danse Macabre as “a darkly poetic tale set in the half-real, half-mythical community of Green Town, Illinois….a shadowy descendant from that tradition that had brought us stories about Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, Pecos Bill, and Davy Crockett.” This formula for creating a “half-real, half-mythical community” can be found in King’s own work.

Stephen King contributes Bradbury with providing a basis for understanding horror in Danse Macabre. King writes: “My first real experience with real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradbury – it was an adaptation of his story “Mars is Heaven!” on Dimension X. This would have been broadcast around 1951, which would have made me four at the time. I asked to listen, and was denied permission by my mother…..I didn’t sleep in my bed that night; that night I slept in the doorway, where the real ad rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine on my face.”

There is little doubt that Bradbury, among others, has been very influential on Stephen King and his writing. Could it possibly be that that moment when Stephen King was four and heard Bradbury’s story broadcasted over the radio that the future writer found his love for a genre that would be forever changed by his contributions? If so, then we owe Mr. Bradbury a debt of gratitude, not just for his own work, but also for his influence on all writers that have embraced his work as a stepping-stone for their own.

(The connections between Bradbury and King go well beyond the few examples that I have provided. I am planning to include more discussions of Bradbury in future posts.)