From the October Country to Neverwhere
I'm sure there are a lot of writers of my generation — and there will be for generations to come — who claim Neil Gaiman as an influence and an inspiration. If you're one of them, you might be just as intrigued as I was to see him talking about one of his big influences, the incomparable Ray Bradbury:
I fell in love with Usher II, in which Martian settlers, representing the repressive anti-fiction movement on Earth that Bradbury had created in his novel Fahrenheit 451, arrive at a scary house on Mars and are murdered by robots controlled by an aficionado of horror and the fantastic. The murders were in the style of the Poe stories The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and culminated in The Cask of Amontillado. It was after reading this story that I resolved that I would one day read Poe, become a writer, find a Scary House, and own a robotic orang-utan that would do my bidding. I have been fortunate in achieving at least three of these goals.
[....] Bradbury at his best really was as good as we thought he was. He built so much, and made it his. So when the wind blows the fallen autumn leaves across the road in a riot of flame and gold, or when I see a green field in summer carpeted by yellow dandelions, or when, in winter, I close myself off from the cold and write in a room with a TV screen as big as a wall, I think of Ray Bradbury . . .
With joy. Always with joy.
