A Graveyard for Lunatics

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A Graveyard for Lunatics
First edition cover
First edition cover
Author Ray Bradbury
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Mystery, Novel
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf
Released July 1990
Media Type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 0-394-57877-5 (first edition, hardback)
Preceded by Death Is a Lonely Business
Followed by Let's All Kill Constance

A Graveyard for Lunatics is a mystery novel by Ray Bradbury, published in 1990. It is the second in a series of three mystery novels that Bradbury wrote featuring a fictionalized version of the author himself as the unnamed narrator.

The novel is set in 1954, when the narrator is working as a writer at a Hollywood motion picture studio, and reflects Bradbury's experiences working on the movies It Came from Outer Space, King of Kings, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. The studio shares a back wall with an adjoining cemetery (as Paramount Studios really does with Hollywood Forever Cemetery), and most of the story takes place in those two locations.

Two of the novel's characters, stop motion animator Roy Holdstrom and autocratic director Max Wong, were based on Bradbury's friends Ray Harryhausen and Fritz Lang. Another character, the shy, blond-haired autograph collector Clarence, may be an alternate autobiographical portrait of Bradbury, who as a teenager waited outside Hollywood studios for glimpses of movie stars.

A Graveyard for Lunatics was preceded by Death Is a Lonely Business, and followed by Let's All Kill Constance.