REVIEW: ‘Killer, Come Back to Me’ by Ray Bradbury from Hard Case Crime
Image courtesy of Hard Case Crime / Provided by press rep with permission.
Ray Bradbury, one of the most important American writers of the 20th century, would have turned 100 in 2020, and no doubt he would have had a lot to write about given the current state of the world. To celebrate the life and legacy of the author, Hard Case Crime recently released Killer, Come Back to Me, a collection of crime stories by the master. This tantalizing read is an excellent chance for Bradbury-ites to go deeper into the writer’s oeuvre and experience some of his non-sci-fi tales.
There are many hits within these pages and honestly no misses. They were originally published in dime mystery magazines in the 1940s, so they drip with pulpy violence, unreliable narrators and dread around every corner. Jonathan R. Eller, a professor and director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University’s School of Liberal Arts, provides an introduction.
The opening tale, “A Touch of Petulance,” has a bit of the supernatural thrown in for good measure. Jonathan Hughes is commuting on a train, and he meets a mysterious man who claims to be from the future. In fact, he claims to be Jonathan Hughes at an older age, and he has traveled back in time to stop his younger self from committing a most heinous crime. Bradbury penned many time-travel stories throughout his illustrious career (“A Sound of Thunder” comes to mind), and “A Touch of Petulance” is one of his most alarming and most intimate. It raises those great Bradbury-ian questions like what someone might do if given a chance to alter history.
Some of the pieces in the book are paired nicely together. For example, “The Screaming Woman” deals with a young child who hears a woman screaming from beneath the empty backlot behind her house. She runs in and tries to grab the attention of her parents, but they are not convinced of this “girl who cried wolf.” The same type of disbelief concerning the youth can be found in “The Trunk Lady,” a truly horrifying tale and one of the best in the collection. This time, a child runs downstairs to tell his parents and their friends that he found a dead woman packed away in a trunk in the attic. Again, he is not believed.
The title story, “Killer, Come Back to Me,” is the only tale in the book with chapters. The story involves a bank robber who falls under the spell of a woman who clearly has an ulterior motive. What starts out as a “little crime” story turns quickly into a gangster thriller of double identities.
“Dead Men Rise Up Never” continues that gangster theme and deals with a kidnapping that turns south. The narrative asks the reader to consider whether amidst horrible evil love can still survive. “Where Everything Ends” didn’t impact this reviewer like the other short stories in the book. The plot takes some getting used to, and the characters are difficult to visualize. The climax, which takes place in a canal in Venice, California, seems too far-fetched for a crime story. “Corpse Carnival” uses a carnival for atmospheric effect, and “Yesterday I Lived!” has a nice old-Hollywood setting.
Some of the best tales are found in the middle of the 300-plus-page book. “The Town Where No One Got Off” seems ripped from the mind of Rod Serling. A man traveling across the United States decides to do something unexpected: get off the train in a nowhere town and see what happens. Little does he know that a local resident has been waiting for him quite some time. It’s a finely-drawn tale with only a couple characters and a wallop of a lesson learned.
The paired pieces of “The Whole Town’s Sleeping” and “A Midnight, In the Month of June” are the high marks of an otherwise near-perfect collection. The first story deals with a group of young women braving the dark streets of a small town while there’s a serial killer on the loose. This one is written in pure slasher-flick mode, and it’s a wonderful example of genre fiction that is equal parts suspenseful and dreary. Then, Bradbury several years later penned a sequel of sorts, told from the perspective of a different character in the original tale. Taken together, these two short stories provide a 360-degree look at the genesis and impact of evil in a bucolic setting.
“The Smiling People” is perhaps the most gruesome tale in the book, and “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl” is the most methodical (with the central character retracing his steps and cleaning off fingerprints so many times he gets lost in his obsessive compulsive disorder).
“The Small Assassin” is a story that is worth a conversation and probably a debate. It involves a mother who almost dies during a C-section. Rather than hold and love her baby after the near-fatality, she scorns the child, believing him to be Lucifer. Some of the content feels dated and cringeworthy (the husband and doctor make a psychological diagnosis of the wife without her consent), but the story still serves as a snapshot of the complicated ways a male writer approaches the issues of motherhood, pregnancy, postpartum depression and healthcare.
The collection finishes with more genre morsels to enjoy: “Marionettes, Inc.,” “Punishment Without Crime,” “Some Live Like Lazarus” and “The Utterly Perfect Murder.” The icing on this deadly cake is an afterword from Bradbury himself in which he contextualizes and downplays his writing chops as a crime author, though by this point he may be as untrustworthy as some of his characters.
Hard Case Crime has done a great service for Bradbury fans by compiling these fascinating, alluring tales into one highly readable collection.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Killer, Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury. Hard Case Crime. 336 pages. $40. Click here for more information.
