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Summary
Summary
A sequel to Bradbury's Death is a Lonely Business, set in a major Hollywood studio in the early '50s. The young hero of that novel returns, newly hired as a sci-fi film writer. Conducting a search for the greatest monster of all time, he accepts a mysterious invitation to a nearby cemetery for a great revelation which will change his life forever.
Author Notes
Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22, 1920. At the age of fifteen, he started submitting short stories to national magazines. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 600 stories, poems, essays, plays, films, television plays, radio, music, and comic books. His books include The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Bradbury Speaks. He won numerous awards for his works including a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1977, the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.
He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted 65 of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. The film The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit was written by Ray Bradbury and was based on his story The Magic White Suit.
He was the idea consultant and wrote the basic scenario for the United States pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, as well as being an imagineer for Walt Disney Enterprises, where he designed the Spaceship Earth exhibition at Walt Disney World's Epcot Center. He died after a long illness on June 5, 2012 at the age of 91.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
YA-- A multilevel story about a man for whom the movies have been a childhood obsession, an adult vocation, and ultimately a horrible, mysterious collision of past and present. Set in a Hollywood film studio back lot, the book presents an interweaving of real film stars of the past and of current productions. Vivid descriptions of the studio world and the real world take readers on a fascinating tour of reality and illusion, both superbly drawn. Film buffs will revel in the inside atmosphere, and mystery fans will enjoy the complicated kaleidoscopic plot. Once again, Bradbury combines the real and the imaginary in a fascinating tale. --Peggy Hecklinger, R. E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hollywood, Halloween night, 1954. At a midnight party in a graveyard adjacent to the studio where he works, the sci-fi screenwriter/narrator glimpses the dangling papier-mache corpse (or real body?) of a film magnate presumed killed exactly 20 years earlier. Then a prop man (or his effigy) is hanged, or else is on the run, and another studio hand is murdered. A Beast is loose, attempting to instill panic on the set, perhaps to cover up what really happened two decades ago. Bradbury eventually ties up the loose ends in a loopy funhouse of a novel peopled with a monocled, imperious Austrian-Chinese director; Lenin's ex-makeup man, from the Kremlin; a gaunt, sermonizing actor named Jesus Christ; a feisty ex-movie queen who demands that ``J.C.'' bless her; and other oddballs. Madness, blackmail, murder and mayhem spell tricks and treats as Bradbury toes the fine line between reality and illusion. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Hyperrhapsodic Hollywood fantasia borne on a soft-rubber mystery plot, or Moby Dick blown up on a trout's spine. The tone: gasping tenderness, an orgasm of epic nostalgia for lost Hollywood charms, sung over a studio landscape modeled from egg-white and whipped cream. The narrator, a fantasy writer with a hundred sales to Weird Stories, has been brought to Hollywood by Maximus Pictures and soon finds himself scripting a monster picture for which his great childhood friend, Roy Holdstrom (read Ray Harryhausen), has been hired to build a model set and animate a clay figure for the most horrible Beast ever seen on film. On Halloween, the narrator receives a mysterious invitation to go to the graveyard across from the studio. What should he find there but the long-dead body of J.C. Arbuthnot, the former head of Maximus Films, who had had one of the great Hollywood funerals. Frightened, he visits Roy, who sets out with him to chase down the now missing body; meanwhile, they must dream up the Beast. Roy gets an invite like the narrator's: go to the Brown Derby and the Beast will appear. Indeed, the Beast does, and disappears. Now the two men are chasing two mythical figures, Arbuthnot and the Beast. When Roy builds a clay model of the Beast, studio head Manny Leiber sees it, unaccountably fixes and dismisses them from the lot. But director Fritz Wong (read Fritz Lang) rehires the narrator to work on his epic Caesar and Christ--and Roy hangs himself. Or does he?--the body's been cremated. Could it be that the missing Beast, much like the Phantom of the Opera, is actually running the studio from his office in a tomb in the graveyard? Gummy. Toothless. A tall crock of kirsch and Classic Coke. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Bradbury's richly lyrical debut novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (S. & S., 1963) was an expansion of his early short story ``Black Ferris.'' This time he employs elements from ``Tyrannosaurus Rex'' (anthologized in The Machineries of Joy , LJ 1/1/64) in composing a loose mystery yarn set in 1950s Hollywood. While working as a screenwriter for a major studio, the unnamed narrator (introduced in Death Is a Lonely Business, LJ 3/15/85) becomes embroiled in a bizarre scandal surrounding the alleged death of the studio's founder 20 years earlier. Charismatic heroes and diabolical villains people a surrealistic landscape which only Bradbury could render believable. An irresistible tale which will be in demand, since it's only Bradbury's second novel since 1963. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/90.-- Mark Anni chiarico, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.