History Creator / RayBradbury

** "All Summer in a Day".

** "Banshee"'s protagonist might be the most explicitly example, as the story is based on his relationship with filmmaker Creator/JohnHuston.

* ThoseWackyNazis: "Unterderseaboat Doktor".

* ZombieApocalypse: One of the zombies in "The Reincarnate" wantsto have this happen.

** "The City"

** A somewhat meta example: If a Bradbury story features the word "[[AllHallowsEve October]]", something horrible is likely to ensue.

* AllHallowsEve:
** In "The October Game", a spooky game at a Halloween party takes a genuinely disturbing turn.
** ''The Halloween Tree'' takes a group of boys through the history of Halloween as they try to save their missing friend.

* ExcitedShowTitle:
** "Mars is Heaven!"
** "Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in ''Your'' Cellar!"

* NostalgiaHeaven: [[spoiler:Eerily subverted]] in "Mars is Heaven".

Raymond Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an acclaimed American author of SpeculativeFiction, [[MysteryFiction Mystery]], {{Horror}}, and {{Literary Fiction}}. He was also known for his screenplays and poetry, and for organizing large [[{{Anthology}} anthologies]] in the ScienceFiction genre.

His most well known novel is probably the {{dystopia}}n, [[UrExample Pre]]-{{Cyber Punk}} novel ''Literature/Fahrenheit451''. His most well known short story is probably "Literature/ASoundOfThunder", which gave the world the ButterflyOfDoom.

* {{Adult Fear}}: "The Night" centers around the disappearance of a child.

* {{Animated Tattoo}}: "The Illustrated Man" used this as a framing device.

* {{Asshole Victim}}: Many characters in his stories deserve their (usually very painful) deaths.

* {{Attack of the Killer Whatever}}: "The Watchers" and "Fever Dream" feature evil bacteria.

* [[BackAlleyDoctor Back-Alley Doctor]]: In addition to being a DeadlyDoctor, M.Munigant in "Skeleton" has no actual medical credentials.

* {{Big Brother is Watching}}: "The Cricket on the Hearth"

* {{Blood is Squicker in Water}}: "The Aqueduct"

* {{Buried Alive}}:

* {{Cruel and Unusual Death}}: "Skeleton". [[spoiler:The protagonist has his skeleton [[AC:willingly]] sucked out of his body which causes him to degenerate into a mass of flesh.]] Averted in that, based on the last line of the story, they survived this, leading to this example possibly being AFateWorseThanDeath instead.

** In "A Matter of Taste" the humans distrust the friendly {{giant spider}} aliens because of their appearances.

* {{Giant Spider}}: The creature responsible for the deaths of various children in "The Finnegan" is one of these. "A Matter of Taste" has an entire alien race of giant spiders.
* {{Glasgow Grin}}: "The Smiling People" combines this with a slit throat.

* {{Hall of Mirrors}}: "The Dwarf"

* LensmanArmsRace: "Golden Ki

* ''Literature/DarkCarnival''

* LensmanArmsRace: "Golden Kite, Silver Wind" describes an arms race of superstition.
* LifeEmbellished: Many of Bradbury's stories are quasi-autobiographical tales, re-imagined with elements of the fantastic and strange.
* LighthousePoint: "The Fog Horn".
* LiteraryAllusionTitle: Several.
* TheLittleShopThatWasntThereYesterday: Appears in "Doodad", in which a man on the run from TheMafia or some equivalent helps a man who turns out to be a shopkeeper of such a shop: it sells "gadgets, gimmicks, doodads, doohingeys" and so on, which are composite imaginary tools capable of doing anything that any item ever described by that name can do.
* MadnessMantra: "The Long Rain".
* MadnessMontage: "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl".
* MagicRealism: Many of his short stories fall into this, usually combined with a hefty dose of nostalgia.
* MoralGuardians: The villains of a great many of his stories, particularly his dystopian fiction.
* MultipurposeTongue: M.Munigant from "Skeleton" use his tongue as some kind of organic vacuum.
* {{Mummy}}: One is constructed in "Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Homemade Egyptian Mummy.".
* MyFutureSelfAndMe : "A Touch of Petulance"
* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast:
** {{Invoked|Trope}} in "The Small Assassin"; David plans to give his son the name "Lucifer" after coming to believe his late wife's fear that the child had tried to kill her was right.
** A somewhat meta example: If a Bradbury story features the word "[[AllHallowsEve October]]", something horrible is likely to ensue.
* NativeAmericanCasino: The setting of "Hail to the Chief"
* NeverMessWithGranny: The protagonist of "There Was an Old Woman" who not only defies [[TheGrimReaper death]] for years but [[spoiler:also manages to cheat death after she has died BY GOING TO THE MORGUE AS A GHOST AND FORCING THE ATTENDENTS TO GIVE HER BODY BACK!]]
* NinjaPirateZombieRobot: "[[http://www.rb2116.com 2116]]", a Bradbury-penned Christmas musical with robots.
* NostalgiaHeaven: [[spoiler:Eerily subverted]] in "Mars is Heaven".
* {{Nothing Is Scarier}}: The main source of generating fear in "The Trapdoor" and "The Thing at the Top of the Stairs".
* {{Not Using the Z Word}}: The zombies in "The Reincarnate" are only referred to as "walkers".
* OurBansheesAreLouder: "Banshee"
* OurGeniesAreDifferent: "The Blue Bottle" has the titular bottle which grants whoever holds it anything they want.
* OurGhostsAreDifferent: "On the Orient, North", "Another Fine Mess", "Hello, I Must Be Going"
* OurVampiresAreDifferent:
** "The Man Upstairs" has a very different example; in addition to apparently having no internal organs, Mr. Koberman can only be identified as a vampire by looking at him through stained glass, which lets you see his aforementioned lack of organs. The mere presence of silver also causes him severe physical discomfort.
** Several members of the Elliot family display vampire like characteristics such as the ability to shapeshift and the inability to be seen in mirrors. They habitually drink blood and sleep in boxes during the day, but apparently that's all voluntary. Timothy and a few other members, like Uncle Einar, get by quite well without drinking blood, and sunlight doesn't seem to hurt any of the family. ZigZagged, to say the least.
* OurZombiesAreDifferent:
** "Interim"
** "The Emissary": Not much is actually said about her condition (other than she's slower and clumsier), but Dog brings Mrs. Haight back to visit Martin after her death in an accident.
** "The Handler"
** The zombies in "Pillar of Fire" can only be resurrected if they actually believe in an afterlife.
** In "The Reincarnate" zombies are apparently a everyday fact of life and they behave the same as normal humans save for their difficulty with movement and weakened senses.
* OutDamnedSpot: In "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl", the protagonist becomes so obsessed with removing all his fingerprints from a murder scene that he actually forgets that his main objective is to escape and get away with the crime — the police eventually find him at three in the morning, polishing old coins he'd found in a box in the attic.
* PerpetualStorm:
** "The Long Rain": a rocket crashes on Venus, where it rains constantly. The crew must locate a Sun Dome in which they can find shelter, or die.
-->It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping in the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.
** "All Summer in a Day". The planet Venus has constant rain, except for a 1 hour period each seven years.
* PersecutionFlip: In "The Other Foot", the population of Mars is entirely black. Because the planet was colonized within recent memory, adults have memories of segregation and lynchings, and when the news arrives that a rocket manned by whites is entering the atmosphere, a furious mob gathers, planning to institute Jim Crow laws in reverse. [[spoiler:They are ultimately deterred when it's revealed that Earth has been bombed out after a nuclear war, and the story ends with the survivors settling on Mars and the hope of a new start for humanity.]]
* PossessiveParadise: Here There Be Tygers, the paradise planet seems to be this way. Once almost all the astronauts leave, since one was killed [[spoiler: eaten by a tiger since he was trying to drill into the planet]] they see the beautiful planet now covered with nasty storms, volcanic eruptions, lightning storms and the likes. [[spoiler:The twist is one astronaut stayed behind; the nastiness is an illusion, as the one who stays will be spoiled rotten by the planet]].
* {{Protect This House}}: Averted in "The Island" where the family could fight off the person invading their home, but they are too scared to even try and [[spoiler:end up with all but one of them dead.]]
* PublicDomainCharacter:
** [[Literature/ThePictureOfDorianGray Dorian Gray]] in "Dorian in Excelsus".
** The three witches from ''Theatre/{{Macbeth}}'' appear in the beginning of "The Exiles".
** The witches appear again in "The Concrete Mixer".
* PurpleProse: He's pretty good at it, though.
* {{Reality Warper}}: The various famous authors in "The Exiles"
* {{Recycled in SPACE}}: Leviathan '99 is literally Literature/MobyDick in a futuristic setting, but with a comet replacing a whale and the ethnic stereotypes replaced with aliens.
* [[Main/RefugeeFromTvLand Refugee from Radio Land]]: The titular character from "Ma Perkins Comes to Stay".
* RiddleForTheAges: "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" never does explain what happened to the native Martians -- only that they disappeared long before humans arrived on the planet.
* RingRingCRUNCH: "The Murderer".
* SafeZoneHopeSpot: The first Sun Dome the team encounters in "The Long Rain".
* ScienceDestroysMagic: "On the Orient, North" and others.
* ScienceIsBad: "The Murderer" and others.
* ScienceMarchesOn:
** There's several pieces he's written that describe one-piece rockets being used for interplanetary and interstellar travel, as opposed to the multi-stage rockets that have actually been used.
** Several stories, including "All Summer in a Day" and "The Long Rain", depict humans living on [[VenusIsWet a Venus that is much like Earth except for the incessant rain]], having been written when little was known about Venus except that it was a similar size to Earth and completely covered by clouds. It's since been discovered that Venus's cloud cover is not composed of water but sulfur dioxide, and furthermore that due to the resulting greenhouse effect Venus has the highest surface temperatures of any planet in the solar system -- anybody who tried to set foot on Venus would be incinerated in moments, long before they had time to get depressed by the precipitation. (This makes "The Long Rain", in which a group of astronauts stranded out in the endless downpour long for the warmth of one of many "Sun-Domes" that provide shelter and ''warmth'', particularly amusing in hindsight.)
* SeaMonster: The unseen creature in ''The Fog Horn'' is a massive behemoth from the depths of the ocean, millions of years old.
* SendInTheSearchTeam: Several.
* SenseFreak: In "The Fox and the Forest", people from 2155 have been embroiled in a war and deprived of creature comforts for a long time. One of the giveaways as to a time traveler is how many things like food and cigars they buy.
* SerialKiller: The Lonely One in "The Whole Town's Sleeping" has killed many women in the town.
* ShakespeareInFiction: William happens to be one of the protagonists of "The Exiles".
* ShellShockedVeteran: The old man in "Lafayette Farewell", [[spoiler:a fighter pilot for Nazi Germany]].
* ShoutOut: Many Examples. A large amount of them towards various authors Ray admired and the films of Creator/LonChaney.
** TyrannosaurusRex is one big one to Creator/RayHarryhausen.
* SkeletalMusician: Inverted in "Skeleton", aside from eating them M.Munigant likes to use bones to make instruments.
* {{Slashed Throat}}: See {{Glasgow Grin}} above.
* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVsCynicism: Works can go anywhere on the scale. ''Literature/Fahrenheit451'' could be more cynical considering its a dystopian novel, but TheHalloweenTree is clearly more idealistic.
* SocietyMarchesOn: These days it's ''very'' hard to believe that the woman from "The Rocket Man" wouldn't have either followed her husband into space or gotten a divorce, years ago.
* SpontaneousCrowdFormation: "The Crowd".
* StockNessMonster: "The Fog Horn".
* StoryboardBody: In the short story "The Illustrated Man", the protagonist gets many tattooes on his body, done by a mysterious old lady. Most of them are normal, but the ones on his chest and back foretell the deaths of his wife and himself.
* StressVomit: At the end of "The Illustrated Man", the thin man throws up when he sees the final image on the illustrated man's back: a depiction of the man's death scene.
* SurpriseCreepy: With so many of his works being lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek affairs, it's easy to forget that Bradbury could do dark and twisted horror with equal skill. The real surprise is the ease with which he can bounce between "whimsical" and "blanket clutching terror" multiple times within a single short story.
* {{Surreal Horror}}: Several Examples.
* TalkToTheFist: An anecdote attributed to Bradbury, though nobody seems to know the source:
-->"A horrible little boy came up to me and said, 'You know in your book ''The Martian Chronicles''?' I said, 'Yes?' He said, 'You know where you talk about Deimos rising in the East?' I said, 'Yes?' He said 'No.' -- So I hit him."
* TextileWorkIsFeminine: "Embroidery"
* TheTapeKnewYouWouldSayThat: "Night Call, Collect".
* {{Those Wacky Nazis}}: "Unterderseaboat Doktor".
* TilMurderDoUsPart: A fair amount of people in Bradbury's short stories are murdered by their spouses.
** In "The Illustrated Man", the protagonist's chest tattoo, when unveiled, turns out to be an image of him strangling his wife. While he initially insists he doesn't plan on doing this, he loses it when she berates him and tells him she's getting a divorce and ends up fulfilling the prophetic tattoo anyway.
** In "The Jar", Charlie kills his wife Thedy after she reveals that the jar he bought contains a lot of junk and threatens to tell the townspeople (with whom Charlie has become very popular) what's in it.
** In "Touched By Fire", the protagonists pass Mr. Shrike coming up the stairs to the apartment on their way down from trying to reason with the verbally aggressive Mrs. Shrike, and it's implied they expect he'll kill her at some point soon.
* TokenHuman: Timothy Elliot is the only member of his family with out any sort of special powers. Keep in mind that almost everyone in his family are immortal, not to mention that many of them are also vampires, AmbiguouslyHuman, or ghosts.
* TomatoInTheMirror: In "Literature/TheTownWhereNoOneGotOff", by Creator/RayBradbury, has a protagonist that is [[IllKillYou suddenly threatened by an old man]], so he reveals [[spoiler:that he was planning on killing someone in this town, which surprises the protagonist, too]].
* ToWinWithoutFighting: "A Piece of Wood" has the soldier protagonist realize how stupid the conflict he's fighting for actually is [[spoiler:he then causes his side to lose by way of a quickly spreading rust virus]] and the murderous general and soldiers can't even do anything to a man who refuses to even fight them.
* TraumaticCSection: Part of the backstory in "The Small Assassin". The doctor originally believes Alice's fear of her child is due to the caesarean she underwent, which nearly killed her.
* TyrannosaurusRex: The centerpiece of the short story of the same name
** In "Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?" the boy protagonist [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin wants to become a T-Rex when he grows up.]]
* VenusIsWet:
** "The Long Rain" is set on Venus, where it rains constantly.
-->It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping in the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.
** In "All Summer in a Day", the planet Venus has constant rain, except for a one-hour period each seven years.
* VeryLooselyBasedOnATrueStory: "The Whole Town's Sleeping" (according to Bradbury) is apparently based on several real murders that occurred in his hometown.
* VillainousBreakdown: Happens to the VillainProtagonist of "Pillar of Fire" [[spoiler: after his plan to cause a ZombieApocalypse fails and he is given a ReasonYouSuckSpeech.]]
* {{Villain Protagonist}}: Many examples
* VillainTeleportation: The titular crowd of people in "The Crowd" can seemingly appear anywhere out of thin air as long as an accident has occurred.
* {{Voodoo Doll}}: One of the witches in "The Exiles" kills an unnamed astronaut with one of these.
* {{Walking Wasteland}}: The [[spoiler:protagonist]] of "Fever Dream" becomes this.
* WingedHumanoid: Uncle Einar of the Elliot family, unlike his relatives, [[AmbiguouslyHuman is completely normal]], save for the enormous green wings sprouting from his back.
* TheWorldIsNotReady: In "The Flying Machine", a man invents the titular device in ancient China. The Emperor realizes that the machine could be used for war (such as for flying over the Great Wall of China), and has the inventor executed and the machine destroyed.
* WouldHurtAChild: The end of "The Small Assassin" has the doctor go looking for Lucifer with a scalpel, intending to kill him, having become convinced that David and Alice's suspicions of him being murderous were right.
* YouAreTheNewTrend: The protagonist of "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" is so immensely boring that he becomes the center of attention in the Avant Garde scene.
* {{Zombie Apocalypse}}: One of the zombies in "The Reincarnate" wantsto have this happen.
** Attempted by the protagonist of "Pillar of Fire" [[spoiler:but never actually happens because he is Main/DrivenToSuicide]]
----

!!Works by Ray Bradbury with their own trope pages include:

* [[Literature/AgainDangerousVisions Christ, Old Student in a New School]]
* ''Literature/Fahrenheit451''

* ''Literature/ThereWillComeSoftRains''
* ''Literature/TheVeldt''

* ''WesternAnimation/TheHalloweenTree''

!!Other works by Ray Bradbury provide examples of:

* ABoyAndHisX: "The Emissary" has the protagonist and his pet dog. [[spoiler:It ends very badly for the boy.]]

* FreerangeChildren: ''Dandelion Wine''.

* LifeEmbellished: Many of Bradbury's stories are quasi-autobiographical tales, re-imagined with elements of the fantastic and strange. This is particularly true of stories collected in the anthology ''Dandelion Wine''.

* MagicRealism: ''Literature/DandelionWine'' and many of his short stories fall into this, usually combined with a hefty dose of nostalgia.

* [[Literature/AgainDangerousVisions "Christ, Old Student in a New School"]]

* "Literature/ThereWillComeSoftRains"
* "Literature/TheVeldt"

* MagicRealism: ''Dandelion Wine'' and many of his short stories fall into this, usually combined with a hefty dose of nostalgia.

* IWasQuiteALooker: One chapter of ''Dandelion Wine'' has a man [[LoveBeforeFirstSight fall in love with a beautiful girl by her photo alone]], only to find out that the photo was taken a long time ago and that the girl is now an old woman. When the old woman learns of this after the two of them strike up quite a rapport, she tells him that they could probably have started a romantic relationship if not for their vastly disparate ages.

* BrokenAngel: "Uncle Einar Has Big Green Wings". Einar Elliott normally flies at night so he won't attract attention, but after running into electrical wires, his night vision/radar is damaged, perhaps permanently. His kids come up with an ingenious solution.

* NamesTheSame: Plenty Examples
** At least two stories are named "Skeleton"
** There also two completely unrelated stories that are named "Chrysalis"
** Many characters from Bradbury's amateur writings are named "The Lonely One" which is also the name of the SerialKiller in "The Whole Towns Sleeping".
** In a "Green Town" story a girl who made fun of the protagonist is named Isabel Skelton, which is also the name of one of the murderous children in "Let's Play Poison"
** Ray also seems to really like his middle name since almost every [[KidHero boy protagonist]] in his short stories is named Douglas.
* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: A somewhat meta example: If a Bradbury story features the word "[[AllHallowsEve October]]", something horrible is likely to ensue.

** Averted in "The Dwarf".

* {{Cassandra Truth}}: Many Examples.

** "The Emissary"

* TomatoSurprise: The ending of "The Town Where No One Got Off" reveals that [[spoiler: the protagonist went into the town to murder someone]]