“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”

This chapter continues the previous chapters’ attempts to unpack the dialogue that existed between Bradbury’s Elliott-Family tales and the broader socio-cultural context of post-war America. In this chapter, Downey unravels the thematic concordance that existed between Ray Bradbury’s fiction and the work of another iconic mid-century American horror writer: Shirley Jackson. In doing so, this chapter explores the different ways themes of domesticity and privacy were imagined in post-war America. The chapter opens with a consideration of Bradbury’s story “Uncle Einar”, wherein the titular character’s marriage to a young human woman is described as “brief, if a little inverted and dark and mildly different to Brunilla, but it ended well”. This description can, in fact, be applied to the depiction of domestic life presented throughout Bradbury’s Elliott-Family stories. The world the Elliotts inhabit—a distinctly indoors, private, yet strangely cosmopolitan one—is precisely this: they embody nightmare shapes from folklore and popular culture, and have unnerving supernatural powers, and yet are only “mildly different” in the context of the version of domesticity promulgated in 1950s America. The close-knit Elliott Family is, in many ways, the epitome of this form of domesticity, which was dramatized in rather similar terms by Bradbury’s contemporary, Shirley Jackson, in her “family chronicles”—Life Among the Savages (1952) and Raising Demons (1957)—as well as in a number of her novels, including The Haunting of Hills House, The Sundial, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Jackson’s family chronicles, like Bradbury’s Elliott-Family stories, mingle imagery relating to witchcraft, demonology, and cannibalism with “cozy” tales of domestic misunderstandings, tensions, and reconciliations. Her novels, however, explore a more complex relationship between domestic privacy, display, and supernatural otherness, in ways that chime in with contemporary ideas about carnival sideshows as sites of encounter with “monstrosity”. Examining the work of Bradbury and Jackson together highlights the complex ways in which privacy and gothic tropes could be made to interact in 1950s America.