Originally published as “The World the Children Made” in a 1950 edition of The Saturday Evening Post, “The Veldt” got its better-known title when it appeared the following year in Bradbury’s classic collection The Illustrated Man. Weinbaum beat him by 15 years with 1935’s “ Pygmalion’s Spectacles”-but he was the first to turn it into high-octane nightmare fuel. “The Veldt”īradbury wasn’t the first science fiction writer to imagine what we’d now call virtual reality-Stanley G. Both stories are chilling, but the sequel is all the more disturbing for forcing the reader to identify with the killer-a literary precursor to the slasher films that would later place viewers firmly in the villain’s point of view. “At Midnight, in the Month of June”, which takes its title from the Edgar Allan Poe poem “The Sleeper” and made its debut in a 1954 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, depicts the same unsettling episode from the killer’s point of view. One of Bradbury’s best-known suspense stories is 1950’s “The Whole Town’s Sleeping,” about a woman who is stalked by a serial killer called “the Lonely One.” (The story was reportedly inspired by a cat burglar who terrorized Bradbury’s hometown when the author was a young boy.) First appearing in McCall’s and later repurposed as a chapter of Bradbury’s 1957 novel Dandelion Wine, the story made such an impression on Frederic Dannay, one half of the mystery-writing duo known as Ellery Queen, that he asked Bradbury to write a follow-up for the magazine he edited. From a homicidal infant to a man who gleefully dismembers his own adolescent daughter, here are five Bradbury stories that are not for the faint of heart. Though Ray Bradbury is most often associated with the gentler frights of Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Halloween Tree, his catalog of nearly 600 short stories includes a few entries that could rattle the most jaded horror fan.

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