Influential Books: Dandelion Wine

Influential Books Feature

I’m starting periodic posts featuring books that have influenced me in some way at different times in my life, or in an ongoing manner. Today I’m kicking this off with Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.

Why Not The Martian Chronicles?

Just getting this one out of the way first, for anyone curious…given that I do write science fiction in addition to other genres. My first exposure to Ray Bradbury’s writing was indeed The Martian Chronicles, which I read at a young age. I loved the book. But when I first read it, I felt profoundly disturbed by it, given I was under 10. This was in the early 1980s, and I could not stop thinking about the book. It took me years to figure out why it had unsettled me so much, and why that power mattered.

It’s a profound book; there's no hyperbole there. I adore it. But it was Bradbury’s unsettling style that inspired me to read his other work. And in so doing, I found Dandelion Wine. After that, I dove into a collection of Bradbury’s short stories, and that moment marked a seismic shift in my writing, having come full circle to write a collection of my own short stories—written as my alt pen name J. Dianne Dotson—which, remarkably, has been compared to Ray Bradbury.

Magical Realism in Small-Town America

In Dandelion Wine, Bradbury spins a slice of life tale about childhood and growing up in small-town America. He used the fictional burg Greentown to provide the backdrop for several stories, much as Stephen King has used Derry, Maine.

Greentown I recognized immediately. I could see my own Southern Appalachian hometown region reflected in the small communities, the cadence, the slow pace of life, the fecund atmosphere for tall tales and disturbing undercurrents. That was very much the sort of place where I grew up.

Greentown offers up magical realism and Americana in a zesty yet comforting dish, much like the kinds my relatives would place on the “groaning tables” of Southern family reunions. The book takes you through the life of a young boy, but expands out from that in ripples to the greater community, and to the dark ribbon of threat from a serial killer preying on young women.

In that regard, the book operates on multiple levels, because there is something truly strange going on in the ravine in the story. I felt like I knew those people, and I knew that place, and I knew the feeling intimately that not everything was at it seemed.

Beautiful Language As World-Building

I’m a highly visual person, being an artist and nature lover. I can see books as movies. I’m a lucid dreamer as well. Not every writer has that magical ability to make me see something so clearly as Ray Bradbury. And, for me, Dandelion Wine is so beautifully rendered from words that it aches to read it.

There is a gilded-summer quality to it all, again with the shadows beneath. Bradbury’s words mesmerize:

Oh, the luxury of lying in the fern night and the grass night and the night of susurrant, slumbrous voices weaving the dark together. The grownups had forgotten he was there, so still, so quiet Douglas lay, noting the plans they were making for his and their own futures. And the voices chanted, drifted, in moonlit clouds of cigarette smoke while the moths, like late appleblossoms come alive, tapped faintly about the far street lights, and the voices moved on into the coming years…

That right there? That’s magic. That is as potent a magic as any proffered spell book, as any incantation by any sorcerer.

And it requires no mythical beings, no spaceships or alien skies, no monsters…yet one feels transported.

Such is the power and the beauty of Dandelion Wine.

Write on!
Jendia