only to discover in the closing lines that he, too,
has contracted the mental disease. Wells had
grown bitter by the 1930s, and much of his fiction
from this period is decidedly inferior and polemic.
In this one case, however, he encased his message
in an eerie and engrossing story.
“The Crowd” Ray Bradbury(1943)
Traditionally, horror stories were usually set in very
specific locations, haunted houses, crumbling cas-
tles, graveyards and dark forests and almost always
took place at night. Some writers realized quite
early, however, that there is a kind of artificiality
about those settings that lacks resonance with
readers. If one really wants to frighten readers, in-
ject something horrible into everyday life, into
pleasant or familiar scenes. Ray BRADBURY and
Fritz LEIBERwere among the first to consciously
shape their writing to challenge the familiar, and
one of the very best early examples is this chilling
story by Bradbury.
In the opening paragraph we are introduced to
Spallman, whose unsafe driving results in a serious
accident, at the end of which he is lying in the
street next to his overturned automobile. He no-
tices the crowd of onlookers closing around him,
hears one of them announce that he will live, and
is surprised to feel an instinctive revulsion toward
them. It is only later while lying in the hospital
that the anomalous nature of their appearance oc-
curs to him. They almost seemed to materialize out
of thin air because the accident occurred in a de-
serted part of the city in the middle of the night.
The image that sticks in his memory is that the
wheels of his car were still spinning as they clus-
tered around him, which means that they must
have arrived within a few seconds.
Following his release, Spallman is disturbed by
his proximity to another accident and pursues his
investigations. He examines clippings of other inci-
dents that occurred in the same part of the city
and notices that certain individuals show up time
and again, always as part of the crowd and always
wearing identical clothing, even though the events
themselves are years apart. Convinced that he has
uncovered proof of some sort of conspiracy, he
bundles up his notes and starts for the police sta-
tion, driving with particular care. It does him no
good in the end. A truck comes out of nowhere
and hits him. He and his documents are thrown
from the car, and the crowd, which includes a
number of familiar faces, ensures his death by mov-
ing him before his injuries can be treated. The
story concludes with Spallman’s realization that
they are the dead and that he is about to join
them. Anyone who has found himself or herself
surrounded by the curious in a similar emergency
can sympathize with Spallman’s terror. Since Spall-
man’s accident was clearly a response to his discov-
ery, the implication is that sometimes we are better
off not knowing the truth. This distrust of the un-
bridled search for knowledge shows up occasionally
in Bradbury’s other stories, particularly his science
fiction.Crowley, John(1942– )
John Crowley started his writing career in science
fiction, moved quickly to fantasy, and in recent
years seems to be moving toward mainstream fic-
tion. His first fantasy was The Deep(1975), mar-
keted as science fiction and set in an alternate
universe where the laws of nature work differently.
His first acknowledged fantasy was Little, Big
(1981), which on its surface explores the existence
of worlds within worlds, specifically the land of
fairies. The story focuses initially on Smoky Barn-
able, who travels to a remote part of New England
after falling in love and discovers that there are
gateways of a sort into a magical realm, although
what follows is not the simple other worlds adven-
ture that it might have been in the hands of a lesser
writer. Crowley uses highly literate prose and a con-
scious awareness of the way in which fantasies are
contrived and used to produce a work that tran-
scends the simple story line that a plot summary
suggests. The text also contains allusions to and in
some cases parodies of some of the classics of chil-
dren’s fantasy. The novel was both a popular and
literary success, despite its sometimes challenging
structure and language. There is also a considerable
amount of humor, although not of the farcical na-
ture generally associated with humorous fantasy.
Aegypt(1987) deals with some of the same
concepts, but it is also a secret history that suggestsCrowley, John 73