The internationally acclaimed author of The martian Chronicles, The Illustrated man, and Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury is a magician at the height of his powers, displaying his sorcerer's skill with twenty-one remarkable stories that run the gamut from total reality to light fantastic, from high noon to long after midnight. A true master tells all, revealing the strange secret of growing young and mad: opening a Witch Door that link two intolerant centuries; joining an ancient couple in their wild assassination games; celebrating life and dreams in the unique voice that has favored him across six decades and has enchanted millions of readers the world over.

STOP CRYING

I love me some Bradbury but I find that my tolerance for hollow sentiment is diminishing rapidly with age.

I changed my rating from 4 stars (2008- I was 22) to 2 (2019- I am 33). Upon 2nd reading, I find 1 of 21 stories great, 1 good, 6 ok, 5 not good, 4 bad, 3 insufferable and 1 "f****** insufferable". Applying an academic grading system to each, my average was a generous overall D.

*SPOILERS*

In nearly every story without exaggeration, characters cry at one point or another out of a sense of heartwarming verklemptness and I have to remind myself not to throw up in my mouth. They cry because their Nightmare Periscope Kaleidoscope is famous, then again because they decide it's time to smash it, because the birds are singing, because they've just invented the bicycle, because they decided to be jitterbug champions again after a lapse of 20 years, because they're revisiting a library from their childhood, because they realize they love their wife again, because teenage ghost apparitions are given by their middle aged unborn sons the addresses of future husbands, or they have a saccharine emotional exchange with the ghosts of Stan and Ollie, or because they're 39 and they have decided where they are going to take their time machine and again when they test it and it works. They weep, somewhat more understandably, when Victorian detectives with inoperable cancer sacrifice themselves to giant spiders, when they are drunk and reading fine English literature, when ad executives contemplate their mortality, when the family dog dies, and when they choose not to dig up someone who has mistakenly been buried alive. I don't have a problem with people crying. Only the best writing causes me to cry, and I'm happy to cry over a good book. Q.T.T.E.'s brand of emotion though is just cheap and easy; not truly felt by the reader, who is being told rather than shown why these situations are moving.

I'm going to build a time machine and travel to 1997, smack Ray sharply across the face with a long rubber dish glove and tell him to dry the hell up! Upon my return, I'll include the exchange in a story called "Last Rites II" in which I visit writers hugely successful in their own lifetimes who could get any old crap published in their 70's by virtue of their belovedness. I smack them with rubber dish gloves and tell it like it is, and when I return their bibliographies are smaller and of higher quality... and "Last Rites" the original may never have been published, who knows?

Amazingly, the one story I still love, Hopscotch, deals exclusively with good old fashioned white bread hetero first love (not a subject I have much sympathy for generally) and the transition into early-adulthood. It's genuine, lifelike, earnest, completely un-sappy. Equally amazing, I'm pretty sure nobody cries in that one. ( )

A rather weak collection, with a sketchy, unfinished, rushed quality to the stories. Bradbury has used this style well elsewhere, but a whole book of it gets tiring. ( )

A collection of 21 stories plus a good afterword. This was a little frustrating as it was quite a mix of material, some very good and some not in about equal measure. Then there was a handful of rather OK ones. In just about every story you could see the spark of an idea that led Bradbury off on his writing adventure, but where he went many times was the frustrating part, or when he let himself get carried away a bit too much with the whimsy or nostalgia. Still, there was some excellent writing throughout. This was a late in life collection for Bradbury and about half of the stories were published in 1994-6 with the rest new to the collection, itself published in 1996. My favorite story here was one called "The Finnegan". ( )

Quicker Than the Eye by Ray Bradbury

First and foremost, Ray Bradbury was a short story writer. [Quicker Than the Eye] is a collection of 21 entertaining stories written in the mid-1990s. Some were published first in magazines. The book was published in 1996, and for some reason, I expected these to be among Bradbury's last stories. But ooohh no; in fact, he was contriving stories for at least another decade. According to Wikipedia, Bradbury wrote more than 600 short stories.

The title story, "Quicker Than the Eye" tells of a man attending a variety magic show with his wife who is chagrinned that one of the "volunteers" from the audience humiliated by a pocket-picking female performer looks exactly like him. In an afterword to the collection, Bradbury acknowledged it happened to him; he attended a magic show "where, to my dismay, I saw someone much like myself being made a fool of onstage."

Other stories are surreal, fantasies, nostalgic. They don't display Bradbury's most sublime side, but they are sound and entertaining.