THE DEEP ONES: "The Lake" by Ray Bradbury

"The Lake" by Ray Bradbury

Discussion begins November 16, 2022.

First published in the May 1944 issue of Weird Tales.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?58399

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The October Country
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
The Ghoul Keepers
Dark Carnival

ONLINE VERSIONS

No authorized online versions found to date.

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L_EwUfqWFE

MISCELLANY

https://raybradbury.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbDFyiuEryE
https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2012/06/ray-bradbury-1920-2012.html
https://tinyurl.com/3hav4x7f

Got round to reading this today. I liked it, but I dunno if I've got much to say about it. Except perhaps that it's a very different kind of weird from most of what we read here.

I read this in The October Country. I don't know if this is one of the stories Bradbury revised for that collection which, as I'm sure everyone here already knows, was an expansion and reworking of his first short story collection, Dark Carnival.

Perhaps it's difficult to find something to say about the story because its elements have become the mainstream in horror and fantasy over the past nearly 80 years: the focus on character, the ordinary setting (in the US rather than in an imagined Gothic "Elsewhere"), the emphasis on the emotional, even sentimental, to give the story its impact.

The late Joel Lane wrote an essay on Ray Bradbury, split across two issues of Wormwood (numbers 5 and 6). It's worth quoting a few of his opening remarks:

...Particularly among American writers, Bradbury has most successfully defined the ambience, idiom and message of the genre. This is because for most weird fiction writers, their genre is not about entities and a view of reality: it is about experiences and a view of life. Bradbury redfined modern Gothic fiction as a dark folklore of the everyday - or rather, the everynight. His signature motifs - burial, old age, childhood, autumn, insomnia, festivals - are key pressure points in the life of every individual. Points at which the application of stress causes bruises of terror and loss.

In this sense, Bradbury is the anti-Lovecraft {...} For Lovecraft, fear is ontological: it resides in the cosmic perspective, the nature of reality and the entities it contains. For Bradbury, fear is existential: it resides in the mortal perspective, the nature of human life and the experiences it contains. The outside begins at home.

I found it a peculiar ghost story given the hints that the narrator's love for Margaret may fade. Why? Is it because the memory of Tally and the possibilities lost will come between them?

I took the story to be a rumination on why youth is our summer because we haven't fully realized that sandcastles crumble, friends die, and love fades.

All in all I found it an affecting story even if it's yet another Bradbury story of childhood.

I took it that Margaret had become a “strange woman” because he’d returned, to some extent, to his perspective of ten years before.

So the prospects of their relationship would depend, I guess, on to what extent he keeps dwelling in the past.

>5 AndreasJ: That's my interpretation. With seeing his mother and Tally as an adult, he's gone sort of a psychic timeslip.

Childhood was so important to Bradbury - t comes up again and again in his fiction, how vivid experiences are, and also how he connects his creativity as a writer to holding onto how it feels to be a child - that I suspect he felt no need to explain the narrator's "psychic timeslip" because he assumed his experience and view of childhood is a universal one, and the reader would instinctively grasp what's happened to the narrator.