THE DEEP ONES: "The Crowd" by Ray Bradbury

"The Crowd" by Ray Bradbury

Discussion begins August 16, 2023.

First published in the May 1943 issue of Weird Tales.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43720

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Dark Carnival
The October Country
The Dark Descent
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

ONLINE VERSIONS

No legal online versions found to date.

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL1rXnanI8g

MISCELLANY

https://raybradbury.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury
https://www.npr.org/2012/06/08/154524695/ray-bradbury-its-lack-that-gives-us-ins...
https://tinyurl.com/yv9zf86c

The trademark Bradbury nostalgia isn't much in evidence here.

You apparently join the Crowd by dying among them, but they're material enough to move people about, yet don't show any signs of violent demise themselves. Post-mortem plastic surgery?

Originally I thought the crowd would turn out to be some kind of vampiric entity, but they seem to be ghosts. At least, that's my interpretation given that you have to be dead to join them. But, I suppose, they could be some sort of vampire or zombie.

I suspect this is an early example of urban horror that Fritz Leiber would work in so successfully.

This had a definite 1940s feel. Set in the city and "modern" for that reason, but with echoes of Noir, of scary radio drama series, of Val Lewton films (especially Cat People and The Seventh Victim).

Maybe the vagueness of the nature of the crowd is part of the horror.

I also thought of Fritz Leiber, but I have also read that Bradbury was a pioneer of this kind of fiction, and one of the writers who enabled Weird Tales to steer away from HPL, CAS, REH style fiction, and towards (for better or worse) modern horrors in recognisable modern American settings.