"The Crowd" (1943)

This Ray Bradbury story has turned up in both the Dark Descent and Weird anthologies, and lots of others too, including Weird Tales magazine where it was originally published. It plays a typical Ray Bradbury trick of taking something reasonably normal—in this case the phenomenon of looky-loo crowds that inevitably gather around accidents, suicides, and other unusual public occurrences—and turning it into something mistily malevolent. For the most part it works really well, with Bradbury using his effects cunningly. Some of it even retain a certain prescience now too, looking forward for example to the ludicrous excesses of J.G. Ballard's Crash (and David Cronenberg's film adaptation of the same name) in the way it puts the common daily occurrence of auto accidents so top of mind. Even the mild-mannered Bradbury seems to be indulging some excess by necessarily including three of these accidents, and the same guy, our main character, is in two (the second deliberate). Simple details propel the best effects in this story: first, how rapidly the crowd forms after an accident. The emphasis is a bit overdone, with Bradbury detailing some of it down to the second as if with a stopwatch. The best effect is when our guy notices that exactly the same people are seen in the crowd at different accidents in different parts of town at the same time. Much like the investigator in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, he has gone to the public library archive to look up newspaper photos. These anonymous people are marked out by simple identifying details: a boy with freckles, a red-haired woman, certain facial features. They are anonymous but they are recognizable and they are the same people. At this point, about two-thirds into a pretty short story, we reach an almost perfect crescendo of menace and mystery, wondering what in the heck is going on around here. Our guy becomes almost like one of them, appearing at an accident, seeing members of the crowd he recognizes, trying to follow them. But they elude him. In my opinion somewhere around here was the place to end the story. We know for a fact that these same people are showing up at the scene of accidents in impossible ways but we don't know why or even how. That's perfect. What strange mad universe are we, etc. Bradbury, however, the Charles Schulz of horror, wants to inject an explanation for our edification and satisfaction, which unfortunately is even more preposterous than the premise. Bradbury often aims to be elegiac but some of his stories have such sharp edges they can only be classified as horror—which, in turn, Bradbury seems to fight in himself sometimes, dulling them with bucolic platitudes, as if his own imagination frightened him. In fairness, I think I might be scared too if I were dreaming up stuff like the first two-thirds of this story in a room by myself.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman's)
The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.

Illustration from YouTube video.