Books: A Graveyard for Lunatics By Ray Bradbury (1990)

“Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery—and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.”

As with Death is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics is the second of three noir mystery tales Ray Bradbury wrote that sort of features a fictionalized version of the author himself as the unnamed narrator. The novel is set in 1954, when the narrator is a writer working at a Hollywood motion picture studio. The setting and themes of the novel are inspired by Bradbury's experiences working on several films during this period, including It Came from Outer Space, King of Kings, and even Something Wicked This Way Comes. The fictional Maximus Pictures shares a back wall with an adjoining cemetery, as Paramount Studios really does with Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and most of the story takes place in those two locations. Two of the novel's characters, stop motion animator Roy Holdstrom and autocratic director Fritz Wong, were based on Bradbury's friends Ray Harryhausen and Fritz Lang/James Wong Howe. Another character, the shy, blond-haired autograph collector Clarence, may be an alternate autobiographical portrait of Bradbury, who as a teenager waited outside Hollywood studios for glimpses of movie stars.

It’s a weird book, more so than previous one. Its plot slowly unwinds and only really gets interesting (and noir-like) during the last third of the book. But Bradbury writes with more enthusiasm and love for Old Hollywood than most writers of his time or those writing today. His prose, his innate ability to craft metaphors and similes, remains his true gift to us readers. He remains forever one of the more odder writers of Dark Fantasy – with a mind that forever remembers his youth, and who ventured from his home in Waukegan, Illinois, on the windy shores of Lake Michigan, and came to Hollywood to show them his talent.