Possibly the finest story in the book is the work of Joe Hill, who is turning out to be one of the most important American writers ever. His story, "By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain," is about three children finding Champ, the legendary monster of Lake Champlain, dead on the shore from some kind of accident. The kids imagine how famous they'll be, and send the youngest to collect adults to prove their discovery, but the adults are all uncaring and uninterested after a night of too many martinis on vacation.

In many ways, it's the most Bradbury of all the stories, though it doesn't have much in common stylistically with his work. Instead, it's a tragic rumination on the difference between the way children see the world and the way adults do. Hill accomplishes much of what his father did in It, but more than that he taps into the fissure between imagination and harsh reality that Bradbury opened so wide. It's a raw, hurtful work that makes a man question what he might have traded wonder for.

But of all the stories, it's "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" by Neil Gaiman that is all that need ever be said about Bradbury's importance to fiction. In it, the protagonist is a man who seems to be steadily losing his memory and possibly his mind. In a series of feverish soliloquies, the narrator laments all the important things that Bradbury taught us, most especially the lessons about what happens when you forget the great works of literature.

It's a bizarre story, more like one of Gaiman's few poems than a proper prose work, and it feels from the beginning like a requiem. It talks as if Bradbury was already gone, and Gaiman woke up in the middle of the worried agonizing over what would happen if something like "Usher II" was erased from the collective consciousness of the world.

Frankly, I wonder that, too. What would a world look like without the ghosts of Guy Montag and Jim Nightshade to haunt us? In a way, Shadow Show is like the Talmud to Bradbury's Torah, a discussion of what the divine word means and how it applies to our lives. It is the words of the priests of the October Country, left as sermons to guide us to glory.