ABSTRACT
This chapter unpacks the nature and meaning of the key evolutionary threads of the fictional Elliott family as developed in the writing of Ray Bradbury. Arising out of explicit comments made by Bradbury, the nature and characters of this vampiric family grew out of his familial ‘context of situation’ and the ‘context of culture’ in which he began to write as an early adolescent. While all authors draw on these memories as an underpinning for their writing, Bradbury is different in that he used these to evolutionary crystallize his personal ‘social imaginary’ and that of the United States through writing and rewriting the narrative of the Elliot vampires over the course of his career. What emerged from this reflexive journey was on the one hand a personal map of self-realization, and on the other a parallel vampiric mimesis of ambiguity and mediocrity. The use of the latter term is by no means pejorative as narrative vampiric instances of the “stable and mundane” indicate the presence of universal liminality. In specific terms, these are indicators of a ‘social imaginary’ captured in between points of existential and axiological crises. “This sort of anxiety finds gothic frames told at both the drive in and at the height of social theory”. While Bradbury came to grips with his disparate notion of self within an Illinois psycho-spatial space, “a name with neither love nor grace”, the Elliot family “who could be, but maybe were not vampires”, struggled to come to terms with their spiritual in-betweenness. The Elliot family’s tree is a prescient reminder that the American social milieu of pre and post-World War II laid the foundation for the horrors of “dislocation and chaos beneath apparent order”.
