American Vampire 2

The Green Town stories that found their way into an accidental novel titled Dandelion Wine and the Red Planet stories that blundered into another accidental novel called The Martian Chronicles were written, alternately, during the same years that I ran to the rainbarrel outside my grandparents' house to dip out all the memories, the myths, the word-associations of other years. Along the way, I also re-created my relatives as vampires who inhabited a town similar to the one in Dandelion Wine, dark first cousin to the town on Mars where the Third Expedition expired. So, I had my life three ways, as town explorer, space traveler, and wanderer with Count Dracula's American cousins. I realize I haven't talked half enough, as yet, about one variety of creature you will find stalking this collection, rising here inPnightmares to founder there in loneliness and despair: dinosaurs. From the time I was seventeen until I was thirty-two, I wrote some half-dozen dinosaur stories. One night when my wife and I were walking along the beach in Venice, California, where we lived in a thirty-dollar-a-month newly weds' apartment, we came upon the bones of the Venice Pier and the struts, tracks, and ties of the ancient roller-coaster collapsed on the sand and being eaten by the sea. "What's that dinosaur doing lying here on the beach?" I said ...»