Books: Poet of the Pulps

THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN (250 pp.)—Ray Bradbury—Doubleday ($3).

Ray Bradbury, 32, is a pulp writer whose work is admired by highbrows. Indeed, his writing has drawn from Novelist Christopher Isherwood such a full-dress tribute as this: "The sheer lift and power of a truly original imagination exhilarates you . . . a very great and unusual talent." Bradbury's new collection of short stories, The Golden Apples of the Sun, shows what has set the Isherwoods off: he is a first-class writer of spook stuff who also happens to have more than a twitch of poet in him.

Out on the...