"A Pleasure to Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories" Ray Bradbury

I have read quite a bit of Bradbury recently.  I'm working through a book of 100 of his stories, I recently read "Dandelion Wine," and I just finished "The Martian Chronicles for a MOOC that I'm taking through Coursera.  I bought the recorded version of "A Pleasure to Burn" because I have enjoyed both the book and movie versions of "Fahrenheit 451" and wanted more.

I am pleased to find variety in the genres of Bradbury's writing.  I'm sure I knew of this before, but had forgotten his horror writing (chilling, really), the depiction of small-town Ohio and the futuristic extrapolations of social/economic/politic ills of his own time.  Although later I complain about the recycling of the same stories, making his oeuvre not as large as I first suspected, his work does have breadth.

I was surprised to find a story common to this collection (Usher II) and "Martian Chronicles" (Carnival of Madness) even though it had different titles in the two books.  The story seemed out of place in the collection of stories set on Mars, but it was clear that it was a story related to "451".  Stendahl and Pikes build a house on Mars and invite the proponents of the Moral Climate Police to visit.  They kill these fans of censorship one-by-one in gruesome ways that come right out of the books they ban.  I have now heard the quote "For the love of God, Montresor!" more times than I care to as Bradbury's builder of the Martian House of Usher reenacts the scene from 'The Cask of Amontillado'.

This quote appeared in other stories in "Pleasure" as many of the stories talk about the censorship of specific types of books, fantasy and the like, rather than the censorship of all books.  I particularly like the first full story, Pillar of Fire.  As the last cemeteries are exhumed on Earth so that the bodies can be burned, a dead man, nee zombie, escapes and tries to live again.  It has been hundreds of years since he was buried and one of the changes is the elimination of horror fiction.  Streets don't need streetlamps because children have no fear of roaming the streets at night in the dark because there is nothing to fear either imaginary or real.  The man goes on a murdering rampage to create other zombies, but he found that even the dead did not understand that they might want to roam the Earth.  A very interesting look at zombies especially in light of the current literary craze even though Bradbury never called the walking dead a zombie.

Also very interesting were three "bonus" stories about people escaping to the past for various reasons.  War was a common theme in many of the stories and some people in these last three stories were time traveling to live in the past to escape their work as part of the war machine in the present.  Very interesting scenarios and I wonder if there was a full-length book that comes from these beginnings.

There were four stories that pre-dated "Fahrenheit 451" and in part became the book later.  Two were shorter versions of "451," one was a simple scene from the book and the fourth was not in the book but could have been cut from it. It has been awhile since I had read the book and I enjoyed hearing Montag's story once again.

Bradbury was prolific, but I am a little disappointed in how many of the stories were recycled in various collections and even 'stitched' together into a book (borrowing his word from the introduction to "The Martian Chronicles.")  With title changes, it is even harder to know whether I have read a story before or not.  Depending on how interesting I am in the story, I'll reread it when I encounter it in the next collection or not, but I suspect that many of the stories I am reading in the "Martian" and "Pleasure" collections will be repeated in the 100 Stories book.