The Stories of Ray Bradbury

(Originally written August 2000 and ported over from the now-defunct Epinions.com)

A couple of years ago, I read Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451."

It was love at first sight. Bradbury's prose set off fireworks in my brain, waved smelling salts under my nose, grabbed me by the hand and spun me in wild

Show More

circles. I emerged dizzy, dazzled and desperate for more.

Unfortunately, the two Bradbury opuses I read after that - "The Martian Chronicles" and "Zen in the Art of Writing" - sped by all too quickly. I craved something more substantial, a book that would take me more than a few days to finish.

I found it on Amazon.com, in the form of a hardcover collection titled "The Stories of Ray Bradbury." This hefty tome satisfied my hunger for a good month or so, and clinched Bradbury's place on my list of favorite authors.

"Here are one hundred stories from almost forty years of my life..." ("Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicycle")

Ray Bradbury, who also writes novels and plays, published his first story in 1938; "Stories" was first issued 42 years (and many, many works) later. The 1999 edition I purchased online is the book's 12th printing; it weighs in at just under 900 pages, and is currently priced at $32.00 on Amazon.

"Stories," as the book jacket states, is a collection of 100 short pieces, culled from forty years' worth of writing. All but six of the stories - in a minor oversight, the book doesn't mention which ones - have appeared before in other books, but I believe this is the largest Bradbury collection to date.

Those who have read "The Martian Chronicles" or "Dandelion Wine" will recognize some of the selections; other works have appeared in smaller Bradbury collections, and/or were published in magazines like Harper's, Weird Tales, or Esquire. Having read only "The Martian Chronicles" at that time (I didn't read "Dandelion Wine" until later), I was meeting most of these stories for the first time.

Aside from the stories themselves, the collection also includes an invaluable introduction by Bradbury that I'd count as the 101st piece. "Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicycle" - written as well as any of his fictional works - provides a fascinating peek at the births of several works in "Stories." The author explains, for instance, that the lions in "The Veldt" were inspired by the lions he met in library books, at the circuses, and onscreen in 1924's "He Who Gets Slapped" with Lon Chaney (Bradbury was 4 years old at the time!). This intro can also be found in Bradbury's writing book, "Zen in the Art of Writing," but it's more useful when paired with the stories it discusses.

"...my stories have led me through my life. They shout, I follow." ("Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicycle")

What kinds of stories hollered at Bradbury? What kinds of stories can be found in these pages?

Stories about the things he loved - Mars, dinosaurs, circuses. About things he feared - monsters, darkness, murder, death. About places he's been (Ireland, Mexico) or places he imagines (Mars, Venus, the future). These works range from the past to the present to the future, into sci-fi territory and back. Some stories are tingled with nostalgia - others plunge into nightmares.

All of the stories are told in Bradbury's distinctive style: crisp, sensitive, vigorous. His prose isn't flamboyant or overstuffed; the small but telling detail is his modus operandi, aided by simply-stated metaphors that are no less vivid for their economy of words. If you read this on the subway, be warned; all five senses get a workout with Bradbury, and it's extremely easy to get lost in his world - and to miss your stop!

I can't summarize all 100 stories for this review, but here are a few (of the many) stories that have stuck with me:

"The Long Rain" - three men making their way to a dry, well-heated place on Venus. I can't read this without being transported to the damp jungle of the second planet, where the rain "cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes."

"Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!" - sweet, humorous, and touching story about a priest and a young man who confesses to candy-flavored cravings - "Swiss delights and temptations out of Hershey, Pennsylvania...the drive of Power House, the promise of Love Nest, the delivery of Butterfinger..."

"The Next in Line" - I avoided reading this quiet but horrifying tale as long as I could. Its depictions of a small-town catacomb in Mexico and the equally dead marriage of its main characters are as creepy as they come: "She lay back and he looked at her as one examines a poor sculpture; all criticism, all quiet and easy and uncaring."

"There Was an Old Woman" - a more comic story about Death and his confrontation with the spirited Aunt Tildy, who stubbornly refuses to give up the ghost: "And every time any of your customers come by, I'll spit ectoplasm right squirt up their nostrils!"

"Skeleton" - another dark story, about a hypochondriac who finds himself at war with his bones. I'm scared of skeletons to begin with, and Bradbury does nothing to alleviate my fear: "A skeleton. One of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake-fingered, rattling things...found on the desert all long and scattered like dice!"

Verdict: five stars for Bradbury fans, four for everyone else

If you like Bradbury, you need to get this book. Yes, there is some overlap with other collections of his, but it's nice to have all these stories in one volume, along with Bradbury's insightful preface.

If you've never read Bradbury, you might want to start with one of his short novels or smaller collections first, just to make sure you like his style. (Thirty bucks isn't that small an investment for a book, after all.) But if you're feeling brave, go right ahead and dive into "Stories." It's an excellent introduction to a great writer.

Show Less

I believe Ray Bradbury to be the king of short stories. 'nuff said.

A big collection of Ray Bradbury's short stories, very similar in feel to Clarke's "Of Time and Stars". The main theme is perhaps death. Good deaths and bad ones, alien ones and those inventive ways aliens can cause them.

Some of the stories are very dated, some still feel quite reasonable as

Show More

modern SF. The short series of Vampire family ones aren't SF at all, and would be perfectly at home in any modern Urban Fantasy collection, despite being written many years (decades?) before the genre was "invented". Obviously a wide range of topics are visited, Mars gets several visits - all of which have a decent atmosphere. Venus is apparently overwhealmed by vast jungles.

Few of the stories contain that magical touch that the very best short story writers can inspire, leaving you thinking in wonder, however none of them are complete clunkers either. I don't think the short story is Ray's best form, certainly there is none of the lasting appeal that Farenheit 451 has.

Readable, but nothing special.

Show Less

Arthur C. Clarke once quipped that "Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories." I don't dispute that, but wouldn't recommend they begin with this volume.

This book contains 100 of Ray Bradbury's short stories, published between the 1940s and 1980; I only noted seven

Show More

that I think are particularly worth reading again. For me, the stories largely lacked tension and mystery. I rarely liked the characters, which were introduced poorly: it would take too long to figure out what to make of them (was "Charlie" even a kid or an adult?) and most of the tales take several pages just to begin--fine for a novel, very bad for a 10-page story. Too often I couldn't tell what the conflict in or moral of a story was supposed to be and was left thinking, "What the heck did I just read?"

Note also that few of the stories in this collection are actually science fiction. Just as many are fantasy and a large number have no speculative elements at all (though none are westerns or detective stories). Two of my favorites, "The Leave-Taking" (about a dying grandmother's farewell lessons) and "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" (about six Hispanic men who each pony up $10 to buy a $60 suit to share) fall in this last category, dealing with quotidian affairs in a moving way. The science fiction stories are nothing special; Bradbury portrays life on Mars in the 21st century being exactly like life in 1950s America, both socially (the women are all June Cleaver housewives) and technologically (the telephone is the mainstay of communication).

The high point of this volume for me was the brilliant nine-page introductory essay by Christopher Buckley; it made me excited to read the stories that followed. Unfortunately, I didn't find that many particularly memorable. If you want to give it a go, in addition to the two mentioned above, my favorites were: "The Fox and the Forest", "Marionettes, Inc.", "A Sound of Thunder", "The Murderer", and "The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind." But I'd more highly recommend the short stories of Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Arthur C. Clarke. Especially if you're a politician.

Show Less

Probably my favorite single book of all time...this specific edition. No filler or lesser works in sight. Pure gold.

A rather amazing collection of stories from Bradbury, showcasing his imagination, his ability to shift tone and topics, and his fantastic use of language. (As a side note: I think I deserve a medal for accomplishing the Herculean task of getting through this nearly-1000 page tome ;-).

That's what I call good imagination; to think up something new that doesn't exist. Intriguing, interesting.

Three and a half *. Read about 15 stories of this collection. In the introduction Bradbury explains that the main reason for him to write is the sheer joy he has in doing it and that is exactly what these stories radiate: the intense pleasure of storytelling. Funny, chilling, surprising they often

Show More

are, the only drawback being the setting that is often repeated: vampires, time travel, space adventures.

Show Less

(Original Review, 1980-11-16)

There are two ways to look at the work of Ray Bradbury. One is to remember how it was: to return to the old friends of youth, when these stories were beautiful, perceptive and spoke of important things. The other is to look at them as they are now: elegant, but a little

Show More

shallow; obvious; sentimentalized. To do the latter is to deny the child still within us. Not to do it is to deny the child's long struggle to become an adult. What to do? Bradbury peers quizzically out of the jacket photo, and, startlingly, displays a strong resemblance to James Thurber's customary expression. Correlations: Thurber, out of Columbus, Ohio, with his stories of put-upon, soft-spoken, dreaming men preserving few traces of simple goodness in the face of management directives from bulky, sensible women.

Mother-and-son stories: Bradbury, out of Waukegan and the part of Southern California that's like Waukegan, with his Mars that's like an adolescent boy's room. The parents see the room as cluttered and come barging in to institute reform. The boy sees each object as precious and beautiful, like shells on a beach, though eroded by time and use. Cast there by wind and water, they lie where they ought to be. Move even one, call it ugly, one of them ugly, and the entire beach is ruined.

Parent-and-child stories: There are a hundred of them here, beginning with the 1943 stories that became the early Bradbury books - "The Martian Chronicles," "The Illustrated Man," "Dark Carnival." Uncle Einar, with his leathery wings, his dreadful power, and his affectionate kindness, from the 1946 "Mademoiselle." The Mexican stories, such as "The Next in Line," in which the American tourist wife realized that she has failed to acquire the rights of an adult; that her husband and, more important, great arbitrary managerial forces will pluck her from her own dreams, kill her, wither her and embed her in a catacomb mosaic.

How can we say there's no true art and no force in these stories? When we found them as children, they spoke to the thing parents never visibly grasp, just as Thurber speaks to the same thing: we spend most of our lives as pawns. Thurber's aging men are no longer adult-past it, if they were ever in it; manipulatable [2018 edit: sic; jeez! What a mouthful!] objects. Bradbury's children not only are not yet adult but may, unless they are very resourceful and especially adamant, be pipelined directly into becoming Thurber men or Thurber women trapped into lives in which their own dreams must be subordinated to the task of supervising Thurber men.

And the great horror on whose brink the Bradbury children poise is that the apparent only choice is to bow down and let oneself be arranged or else to become a heedless, insensitive arranger. To give up childhood is to opt for becoming the keeper of a catacomb.

And they are we. Only in part, of course. Life is too various, too flexible, too multifarious for a child to have appraised it all. We are not all advancing toward becoming Walter Mitty, with his errand for puppy biscuit, and Mrs. Mitty, with her errand for keeping Walter Mitty from wandering out into the traffic. Right? Can we all see that? It's not simplistic, as Bradbury makes it. But when we are a little older, perhaps it will be, again.

There's no one for whom to review this book. Adolescents are not concerned whether Bradbury is an important figure of some importance in "belles lettres." It's evident to them that he is. And he's one of the few who is their friend, and you don't analyze your friends. As for you and me, poised here in the hiatus between the initiatory and the terminal stages of helplessness, each of us works out his or her own appraisals of what's useful and what's not. And those old gaffers over there, whom we love, respect and tend - what does it matter what they think?

Bradbury is an overblown stylist, a sentimentalist whose work is better remembered unre-read. And remembered, and remembered. He is a showy and euphuistic storyteller who is forever making tempests out of zephyrs, who plays on anguishes doomed to be seen for the simple glandular secretions they are, just as soon as the glandular secretions slow down. None of those in power over their own lives will find much to approve of in these stories.

So don't ask me what Bradbury's doing these days. He's beginning to look like James Thurber. He's out there looking for the perfect parent and the perfect child. He's doing whatever we're doing. It's no longer 1943, and we're all engaged in serious business.

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]

Show Less