Boyll, Randall(1962– )
The popularity that horror fiction enjoyed during
the 1970s and 1980s came to a stunning halt in
the early 1990s. The number of new titles dropped
dramatically, and a good many writers who had
built careers in that genre were forced to write very
different books or stop writing altogether. One of
the most promising of the writers who debuted at
just the wrong time was Randall Boyll, whose After
Sundown(1989) was an extremely effective and
chilling novel. A family vacationing in a remote
cabin find that they are surrounded by the spirits
of people who died at the hands of a religious fa-
natic. The very landscape surrounding the cabin
alters to prevent them from escaping.
Boyll was chosen to write movie novelizations
soon thereafter, and more than half of his subse-
quent novels were of that type, including a series
based on the Darkman comic books and films. His
second original novel, Mongster (1991), was a
somewhat confused blend of humor and horror. An
abused child learns of the existence of a hidden
treasure and raises the dead to protect himself
from his enemies. His third original novel, Chiller
(1992), is a very unsettling story and easily Boyll’s
best book. A grieving father steals the body of his
daughter from an experimental laboratory where
she is being studied because, although dead and
rotting, she is still conscious. Their flight from the
FBI and other pursuers is a sequence of bizarre and
sometimes disturbing scenes.
As horror became more difficult to sell, Boyll
moved increasingly toward novelizations and mun-
dane suspense. Katastrophe(2000) does have some
supernatural content. Under hypnosis a man
claims to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler,
which precipitates a world crisis, but the tone is
very different from that that made his earlier hor-
ror novels so emotionally gripping. Recent signs of
an increase in the popularity of supernatural fic-
tion may lure him back to the genre in the future.
Bradbury, Ray (1920– )
It is a function of the way fiction publishing works
in the contemporary world that novels are far more
likely to attract attention than does short fiction
and that most writers who actually derive a living
from their art are those who produce book-length
works with some regularity. One of the rare excep-
tions to that rule is Ray Bradbury, who had until
recently produced novels only at great intervals
and in a variety of genres ranging from contempo-
rary fiction to science fiction to horror. He is also
one of the few genre writers, such as Kurt Von-
negut, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula K. LE GUIN, who
has managed to attract considerable attention
from mainstream critics and editors, and in fact
many of Bradbury’s earlier short stories found a
home in the mainstream or slick magazines of the
1950s.
Bradbury was drawn to fantastic literature by
the early science fiction magazines, but it is signifi-
cant that his second published sale was to Weird
Tales,a magazine that specialized in what we now
call dark fantasy. He was incredibly prolific
throughout the 1940s and with consistently high
quality, producing too many classic stories to men-
tion all of them, the most outstanding of which
were “THE CROWD” (1943), “THE JAR” (1944),
“The Traveler” (1946), “THE SKELETON” (1945),
and “THE SMALL ASSASSIN” (1946). Some of his
most suspenseful and effective stories include “The
Handler” (1947), in which a mortician with a pen-
chant for playing practical jokes on dead bodies
gets his just deserts when some of them become
animated, and “The Man Upstairs” (1947), a very
subtle vampire story. Several of Bradbury’s charac-
ters refuse to accept death, as in “There Was an
Old Woman” (1944) and “The Dead Man” (1945).
His first collection, Dark Carnival, appeared in
1947 and contained almost exclusively stories of
supernatural horror, but he was already expanding
his horizons. Most of his subsequent collections
would mix science fiction, fantasy, horror, straight
suspense, and contemporary drama indiscrimi-
nately. THE ILLUSTRATED MAN(1951) was another
collection loosely organized under a frame story—
each individual tale being represented by a tattoo
on a man’s body—but the stories themselves varied
from straightforward science fiction to horror.
Bradbury’s science fiction, never particularly
rigorous with regard to scientific accuracy, grew in-
creasingly implausible from a rational viewpoint,
and his classic collection of stories about the colo-
nization of Mars, The Martian Chronicles(1950),32 Boyll, Randall