Messages in a Bottle

During the year after his November 1999 stroke, Bradbury worked with his daughter Alexandra and his HarperCollins editor Jennifer Brehl to pull together a new story collection, One More for the Road (2002). Chapter 37 surveys the reception of this collection and the nearly simultaneous Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony. The rest of the chapter centers on Let’s All Kill Constance!, Bradbury’s third and final autobiographical novel. Like the first two, it focuses on an emerging mid-century writer who is based on his own memories of a much younger Ray Bradbury; the new novel continues the young writer’s emerging ability to solve the mysteries that began in Death Is a Lonely Business and continued in A Graveyard for Lunatics.