Masks
edited by Donn Albright

This book is the latest piece of literary archaeology from Donn Albright, Bradbury's bibliographer. Ably assisted by William Touponce and Jonathan Eller, who provide vital contextual essays to the volume, it attempts to reconstruct Bradbury's long abandoned concept for a novel.

Bradbury began work on the concept in the 1940s, and at one point planned Masks to be his second novel (after The Martian Chronicles). In the 1950s he applied for a Guggenheim grant to support him in the development of the work, but was unsuccessful in the bid.

The present volume reprints as much of the relevant material from Bradbury's files as has been found to date. As a novel, there isn't that much - something like thirty pages of outline. However, much of the work Bradbury did was really in short story form. This has always been his preferred form, after all. As a result, many of hte fragments stand alone rather well.

The book really needs a bit more explanation throughout; it has a tendency to feel like a scrapbook. Unlike the earlier Match to Flame, which gave a sense of a literary journey through Bradbury's development process towards Fahrenheit 451, this volume is sometimes a random assembly. Perhaps with good reason - the material here is largely off-cuts and discards, sometimes impossible to accurately date.

Nevertheless, for the Bradbury scholar or completist, this is a fascinating look at Bradbury at the peak of his creative powers. We can only ponder what might have been if this had actually been Bradbury's second novel.

Contents:

Preface

Introduction

Foreword

The Msk Beneath The Mask Beneath The Mask

The Masks

The Man Beneath The Mask (fragments in facsimile)

Guggenheim Application

Copyright Registration

Short Stories:
Notes
The Face of Natalie
They Never Got Mad
The Drothldo
In The Eye Of The Beholder
The Walker In The Night
Gallagher The Great
The Doll

Lettered edition additional contents:
Notes
Study In Bronze (facsimile)
The Walker In The Night (facsimile)

Masks

First published by Gauntlet in 2008.

Picture shows Gauntlet first edition. Cover art by Donn Albright.