Bradbury, though a celebrated author, is often shortchanged. He is valorized within one genre (science fiction) and marginalized in others (detective fiction, film scripts, poetry, and, yes, horror fiction). His importance and influence have been distorted by critics who never foresaw our present paradigm, one in which horror writers like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith are imprinted by Oxford, and Stephen King, once dismissed as a schlock meister par excellence, is awarded the National Medal of Arts.

While indeed a genre-defying giant in science fiction, Bradbury deserves a place alongside the traditional masters of the macabre. The essays in this collection decrypt Bradbury’s horror tales and decipher their social and artistic impact. Just scratching the surface of Bradbury’s genius, these essays demonstrate that, while much remains buried in the Bradbury corpus, none of it is dead.

The New Ray Bradbury Review, prepared and edited by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, examines the impact of Bradbury’s writings on American culture and his legacy as one of the master storytellers of his time. The New Ray Bradbury Review and the multivolume Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury are the primary publications of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, the major archive of Bradbury’s writings located at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).