Masks by Ray Bradbury.

Masks is an unknown and unfinished Ray Bradbury’s novel that he was writing in the second half of 1940s. This composition never met my eyes. I was offered a book with this title as a gift. I did a quick checking, and found it exists and it isn’t hoax (this sometimes happens). I accepted it because I couldn’t reject a written with this name. Time later, I did a proper check because Masks hasn’t mentioning in the author’s biography and lists of all kinds of compositions made by him. However, I found sources confirming that Ray Bradbury worked on that. I could realize that without the investigation when I was already reading the author’s introduction, because it could have written only by him. Fraudsters usually don’t counterfeit a writer’s style, as similar it does with paintings. Masks is about creation of the unmade novel. This book was released, and still comes, in limited, beautifully decorated edition that today can be acquired for one hundred fifty dollars minimum.

This book contains materials of variable variants of Masks, which went through what became as an evolution process, coming to a final honed version in dozens of pages that from a holistic piece turns into describing of what is happening. It contains author’s drawings of plans and paintings. That book was recreated thankfully to Bradbury’s researcher Jon Eller, who shouldn’t have included his tiny putting of own opinion, and no less contribution was made by another writer’s scholar, Donn Albright, who had access to the author’s house, and he was polite by not exposing his view. Nevertheless, these men made to see Masks and its background story. I couldn’t only accept that following to a fad of giving a foreword to an outside man, because, as all these bad writers can do sometimes, that person spoiled plots of the six short stories, which included there. However, he was mostly incorrect in disclosing details.

Ray Bradbury’s writing shows from his first written stories, as Masks is from that period, is light, flowing, easygoing, and you get engaged in his characterizing and comparisons of surrounding, places and people. I already want to follow, even if I don’t like it. That wasn’t with Masks. The author discloses how powerful and deep he was, not only in prose itself, but in philosophy and human psychology. An idea of a man with multiple faces is incredibly researched in reading the ultimate variant, and I was left intrigued about how it would look if he had realized his ideas of all kinds (the plot, the human nature, the subtexts.). I am groaning that he didn’t complete his masterpiece.

Of other variants had his excellent writing or being in development. But all these previous versions, with different locations and characters–as using masks as an eccentric experiment instead of that is a man with inner feelings–weren’t matching. A conception of a play for television also had attraction, but all that was an improvement toward the ideal. The book makes to experience it.

The texts are interspersed with Bradbury’s talent in drawing, in which I love and astonished by one where a mask inside of a mask.

The book leads to never published before little stories. “The Face of Natalie” contains a few irrelevant metaphors, and the storyline turns into a usual, senseless melodrama. “They Never Got Mad” is a story with comes to that it is not of my kind and not interesting for me. “The Drothldo” makes the excellent resolution; it is a powerful piece that reflects a period when it was written and demonstrates the author’s courage, which he always had. “In the Eye of the Beholder” is a novella, which, as always, has great metaphors–aside from one needless about reaction of a motionless manikin–but that intrigue heads to an odd moral and ends against sense. “Walker in the Night” with its mystery has a preposterous revelation and follows to misunderstanding why the characters take a different direction. “Gallagher the Great” was promising on reasoning about the substitution of things in the beginning, but the author doesn’t create better in fantasy than a strange combination of shows and the same weird and overdramatized ending that has no a proper conclusion point. The last pages follow with another variant of one story that also was curious to read.

This book, Masks, is a lost treasure, which is an honor to have. I’m gleeful about the incident.