Long After Midnight

Every story in this book takes you somewhere interesting.

Some of them are hits, and some are misses, like most short story collections.

I think Bradbury rushed some of the short stories he wrote because he was selling them to magazines, which was probably paying his rent.

His short story collections though are definitely worth the read because there are always a couple of gems in each one.

There's a story in "Long After Midnight" that's now going to be up there with my favourites, "A Story of Love"

I recommend it, even just for that beautifully written short story.

In my review of The October Country, I noted that Ray Bradbury was one of the first writers I read as a boy. I'll expand a little on that in this review. I bought this paperback in, roughly, 1979 in either Waldenbooks or B. Daltons, from the Ocean County Mall in Toms River, NJ. I read a few of the stories but then it sat on my shelf for nearly 30 years before, repacking some books, I found it again and decided to read it through.

Ray Bradbury is an odd writer to discuss in this day and age. Renowned science fiction writer, and generally famous and respected author, he's not really what anyone would consider an edgy or "cutting-edge" writer. He has a bit of a reputation for a treacly or mawkish tone to his work which may or may not be deserved, depending on your tolerance for such things as idyllic reminiscences and small town Americana. Bradbury often, but not always, writes short fiction in an allegorical or parable-like mode, which does not work for a lot of people, but this very quality, and his lyrical use of language, make him a great author for kids and teens to discover, not the least of which because a recurrent theme of Bradbury's work are those exact moments in life. Bradbury, more than any writer I know, is able to conjure up the endless summers and autumns of the pre- and just-post adolescent as lived in middle America in the early part of the 20th century. It is as if all of his mental recorders were running at full tilt at this age, noting and storing every sensory impulse to later be conjured forth in service of delicate moments and bittersweet characters in sad and wonderful stories. His almost effortless ability to open a door back to this time in a person's life is amazing, and he exercises it quite a bit.

Perhaps most famous is Ray Bradbury, the science fiction writer, most notable for The Martian Chronicles and endless other stories about Mars, postulating the victories and failures of Man's conquest of the Red Planet as seen through the lens of America's previous history in the settlement of the North America continent and our view of ourselves in the space-age, circa 1940's sci-fi and 1950's nuclear science. Bradbury was my initial taste of sci-fi, and I always preferred his humanistic approach to the genre, never being much attracted by space opera (E.E. "Doc" Smith and the like), hard sci-fi (Larry Niven, et al.) or even the generally accepted masters of the genre, Isaac Asimov, etc., who I have nothing but respect for. Eventually I realized that, really, sci-fi just wasn't my bag, but my most extensive early readings in it were mostly writings by Ray Bradbury.

Secondly, there is Ray Bradbury the horror/dark fantasy/crime writer - Bradbury banged out many stories that were not science fiction and his second largest output falls into these genres. The stories in The October Country are classics, but there are others (one bone fide example, possibly the darkest story he ever wrote, appears in this collection) - many of his stories were adapted by 50's horror legends E.C. Comics in titles like TALES FROM THE CRYPT, and his famous novel Something Wicked This Way Comes is a classic of dark fantasy. It was not just endless summers that Bradbury could open doors on, there were also endless autumns and Halloween nights, not to mention his plot-driven conte cruels that fall under the rubric of crime fiction.

This collection contains examples of both of these outputs, but also contains a few sides of Bradbury less seldom seen: the humorist, the romantic, the straight literary. Yes, the accusation of mawkishness could still be made for a few of these stories, but I'd argue that Bradbury was never about childhood innocence being better than adulthood, but more about the melancholy acceptance that such times must pass for all people who want to mature.

Instead of doing an overview of this collection from least to most successful, as I tend to, I'd rather lump stories together by theme. First off, some of the least successful stories here can be called "love-letters to great writers" - none are particularly bad, but they seem to take advantage of Bradbury's general short fiction model (the broadly drawn parable) to merely allow the story to occur, by dint of advanced technology, without ever engaging a number of other questions they raise. For example, "G.B.S. - Mark V" gives us a future in which android replicas of great thinkers (in this case, George Bernard Shaw) are brought along on extended space trips as entertainment and stimulation for the crew. Except, by this point, most of the crew would rather indulge in virtual reality-esque masturbatory technology that keeps them sexually stimulated. A lone crewman is mocked and derided for choosing conversations with android Shaw over the sensoriums, but gets his personal wish fulfilled when the ship meets with an accident. In this story, one of the default Bradbury situations (sensitive, caring soul ostracized by brutish, callous masses) that makes a story like "The Smile" (not in this collection) such a classic, seems merely familiar and lazy - an excuse to write effusive praise and wads of prose about, and in the style of, Shaw, while using the parable structure as an excuse to cover plot holes (it doesn't make sense that all the crew reacts so vehemently, as these androids must have been widely used and accepted at one time). Along the same lines, though slightly better, is a tribute to Thomas Wolfe, "Forever and the Earth", in which the famous writer is snatched from his deathbed by time machine, because a rich man believes only Wolfe's writing can capture the grand scope and glory of man's adventures in the future age of space exploration. This, as I said, works better than the Shaw piece but one can't help questioning the rich old man's assurance that no writers of his own age have the skill and talent to get down in words the sweeping majesty of the time, and Bradbury's conception of an author's genius seems naive, as if one could just plug, say, Shakespeare, into the age of genetic research and expect him to instantly be capable of capturing its essence - I feel men, even geniuses, are of their time and only those OF their time can capture/record it. Finally, into this theme would fall "The Parrot Who Met Papa", which has no genre elements but plays as a broad comedy (not one of Bradbury's strengths as a writer) in which a parrot that Ernest Hemingway kept near him constantly in his later years, and which may hold his last unwritten novel and juicy gossip about fellow writers in its brain, is kidnapped. It's not bad, but not noteworthy either.

Next up, there are a clutch of stories I could call "adolescent idylls", in which youth, or the memories of youth, play a major part. "One Timeless Spring" features a boy who perceives the shift from youth to adolescence as a secret invasion of ideas and actions (orchestrated by adults) until a first kiss defeats him and repositions him on the "enemy" side. In "The Utterly Perfect Murder", a solid story, a man awakes to find that his deeply nursed hatred and resentment for a friend's betrayal during his boyhood can be resolved by a easily committed murder, but upon putting the plan into action discovers that time has done his work for him. "A Story Of Love" is a touching tale of an adolescent boy's first crush - unfortunately it is on his summer school teacher and while she (at least emotionally) reciprocates, she's forced to make him understand that it cannot be. Again, some might find this maudlin but I don't read a lot of overly emotional writing and I found it moving and bittersweet. Even more powerful is the surprising "The Better Part of Wisdom" which is about an aging Irish grandfather's discovery that his adult grandson is gay, which leads him to recount a heart-breaking recollection of his youth on the shores of Ireland and a still deeply felt, but short-lived, friendship he shared with a gypsy boy. It's nice to see Bradbury dealing with these themes (in 1978, if not earlier, as the story has no publishing credit), as many writers his age would probably balk at touching on it (see also the titular tale, discussed later). In "The Miracles Of Jamie", a teenage boy is convinced (like many younger children are) that he can cause things to happen by willing them so or following prescribed patterns - yet we quickly realize this is a coping mechanism designed to handle the normal pressures of the teen years and an untenable home situation. It's well done, if bittersweet. Finally, there's the very slight piece called "The Pumpernickel", in which a loaf of bread sets off a cascade of memories in an old man who begins to wonder why people who enjoy good times as youths tend to drift apart as they grow older. As I said, it's pretty slight.

There are a few straight literary pieces, sketches of humanity with, again, no genre elements. "Getting Through Sunday Somehow" is a nice narrative of a Sunday in Dublin when everything shuts down, which drives a man into the street and then into the presence of a street musician. It's an odd but effectively thoughtful tale about the giving of thanks for small graces and the proper application of those thanks. "Interval In Sunlight" is a longish story that reminds me of "The Last In Line" from The October Country. It features another unhappy couple on a trip through Mexico but this piece delves into the psychological dynamics and petty infighting of a relationship in which the wife is a successful writer and her husband a passive-aggressive jerk. Again, hard to know when it was written, but I don't think the passive-aggressive dynamic was as well-sketched out then as it is understood now, and so that makes the story interesting, although it meanders quite a bit and feels unfocused. "Darling Adolf" is another unfocused story - on the surface it's about a low-grade actor who takes his film role as Adolf Hitler a little too seriously. Then he's kidnapped by the actors playing other Nazi regime figures (Goering, Goebbels, et al.) and the film's producers (who really seem to be the main characters) restage the Nuremberg Rally to smoke him out. It's hard to tell exactly what the intent or even the tone of this piece is - it seems like Bradbury venting his spleen about the dark charisma of Hitler and Fascism, but it never digs very deeply into the idea (for example the producers are ostensibly the heroes, yet it was their resurrection of Hitler in the first place, for a cheap movie no less, that triggered events, and their ability to invoke Nuremberg through sfx hokery seems more of a plot contrivance than any deep commentary on the concept). This story comes across as an interesting failure, as if the normally assured (sometimes, arguably, overly assured) Bradbury was unclear on what he was intending to convey. The cute but slight "Have I Got A Chocolate Bar For You" features a priest who hears a confession from a chocolate bar addict - it seems to be trying too hard to hang too much on a small idea, quite frankly. The title tale, "Long After Midnight", concerns the effects a cliff-side suicide engenders in a trio of policemen of differing career lengths. In the end, an overlooked detail overturns their assumptions and flips their perspectives, but should it? Again (like "The Better Part of Wisdom") this features Bradbury (to a lesser extent than that tale) engaging with material of the time instead of his familiar tropes of bygone years. An interesting story that, again, would give an adolescent pause to consider their own assumptions.

There are a few straight-ahead science fiction tales here as well. "The Blue Bottle" is another Mars story, a strong allegory about the pursuit of dreams over the disappointment of achieving them. This is the kind of story I mean when I talk about the benefits of reading Bradbury when you are a youngster - the points this tale makes might seem trite to an adult but could be very powerful to a less experienced (and, yes, less cynical or pragmatic or realistic) mind. "A Piece of Wood" is another allegory as a scientist, tired of war, invents a way of destroying some (but not all) metal - the concept seems pulpy and (again) a bit naive in this day and age. "The Messiah" is yet another Mars tale, and pretty interesting stuff as a stray native Martian's telepathic abilities intertwine with a priest's faith in and need for a messiah figure, clashing with mankind's burgeoning interaction with the skittish natives. "Punishment Without Crime" updates a Bradbury classic ("Marionettes, Inc.") as the company has moved into manufacturing duplicates of people for the sole purpose of individuals purchasing cathartic release by murdering the duplicate. It's a well done meditation on the differences in the idea of crime in conception and actuality.

Finally, there are a handful of dark fantasy/horror tales here. "The Burning Man" (which was ineffectually adapted on the 80's TWILIGHT ZONE revival) is a great little spooky gem written in a light, breezy style, about evil hatching from the mud on a hot day. "Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds" is a wonderful tale of a witch and an age-old offer made to a very burned out denizen of NYC. This is prime, fanciful Bradbury, full of evocative passages and lyrical descriptions (the conception of the witch and her powers is beautiful) - some of the best fantasy writing he's done. "The Wish" features a man's Christmas wish that his father return from the dead - of course it's answered but (in a lighter and more tender variation on "The Monkey's Paw") does not solve the eternal problem of death and loss. Well written but a bit familiar.

Finally, we come to "The October Game". This brilliant, ghoulish, nasty story is almost certainly the darkest thing Bradbury ever wrote. Even the sociopathic infant of "The Tiny Assassin" (another classic not featured in this collection) pales in comparison to this tale of a boiling hatred and resentment that is nursed until it finds expression in an innocent children's game on Halloween. The final line ("and then some idiot turned on the lights") may be one of the greatest lines to end a horror story ever. Amazing stuff.

As a whole, I'd consider this an interesting but uneven collection, more interesting for Bradbury fans (I'll tell you the truth, I'd imagine reading a "Complete Short Stories Of" type collection to be a daunting task that would probably have to be approached in stages, for fear of burning out on lyrical description) than the casual reader, but then, for all I know, some might greatly enjoy the wide variety of tones and styles offered here.

The October Game was my favorite story in Long After Midnight. It's one of those tales where the last line punches you right in the gut.

Unfortunately, many of the rest of the stories didn't resonate with me. Perhaps I read this collection too close to The Martian Chronicles? I couldn't help but compare the two and The Chronicles always came out ahead.

I'm still happy that I read this collection, as my goal is to read all of Ray Bradbury's work. I guess not all of his stories are going to knock the ball out of the park, but a mediocre Bradbury story is still better than a good one from most other authors.

Recommended for fans of science fiction, dark fiction and short stories.

Not long ago, in a moment of minor personal crisis, I found myself hungering after the literary equivalent of comfort food. Something familiar, but not too familiar—not familiar to the point of boredom. Yet something that would give me a predictably pleasant lift.

Wandering our basement library (which contains some 3000 of those bulky pre-Kindle items earlier generations called “books”), I came across the perfect thing: a copy of “Long After Midnight” by the late Ray Bradbury.

But not just any copy. My “Long After Midnight” is the first edition, published by Knopf, and in fact, it’s the first brand-new hardcover I ever bought. The book is in very good condition, and the dust jacket is nearly perfect, having had a Brodart jacket protector applied to it a few years later, when I was in college and began doing such things.

The price indicated on the front jacket flap, $7.95, raises a smile with me today. The back flap reads “9/76,” and that’s about right: I have a feeling that I purchased the volume shortly after my fourteenth birthday, around the time I entered high school. Most likely I did so with some birthday money (I’m an August baby). I can remember being in the bookstore, which was on State Street in downtown Santa Barbara, though the name of the shop has vanished from my memory. I recall how special I felt, picking up from the display table such an expensive item, a brand-new hardcover book, and taking it to the counter to pay for it. My dad was with me, which is further evidence that this must have been birthday-related: my father wouldn’t have been caught dead in a bookstore otherwise.

I owned hardcover books already, of course, but they were of two varieties: 1) thrift-store purchases, a quarter for, say, a beat-up old Perry Mason novel; or, 2) book-club reprints, received in the mail and, I’d begun to recognize by comparing them to the editions found in the local library, distinctly cheap in their paper and bindings. By the time I was thirteen or so I understood the difference between a cruddy book-club job and a real publisher’s edition.

I no longer recall how I discovered the work of Ray Bradbury but, like many young kids with a burgeoning love for the “dark fantastic,” I went through a major phase of reading him—he was one of the main conduits in my transitioning from reading mostly books my mother liked (primarily mysteries, Ed McBain and Dell Shannon) and striking out on my own, into unknown territories. Childhood is, of course, the ideal time to discover Bradbury’s work (and science fiction/fantasy in general), and I fell thoroughly in love with this master of plot and prose through the usual channels: “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Illustrated Man,” “S is for Space,” “R is for Rocket.”

“Long After Midnight,” then, has retained a special place in my collection, and it has another significance as well—it was also the first book I ever got signed by its author. This happened in 1983, at Santa Barbara’s Andromeda Bookstore. I remember little of the event except that the line was long, customers were limited to one book each, and I was surprised when I finally made my way to the front to see how puffy and red-faced Mr. Bradbury looked. It was suddenly obvious to me that the author photos on his books were some years out of date.

I would love to be able to report that this one-time meeting between a present literary titan and a future one was a memorable exchange of witticisms or profound philosophical ideas, but in fact what it amounted to was a nervous young fellow who simply pushed his book toward The Great Man and said, “Hi,” to which said Great Man responded memorably, “Hi.” He signed the book with a big purple marker, adding the date: “6/18/83.”

He handed the book back to me. I said, “Thank you.”

And that was it.

Oh, well.

Still, though the book has had a proud place on my shelves for decades, I realized something as I pulled it down recently, searching for that literary comfort food.

I had not actually read this book since I bought it way back in 1976.

Read it all the way through, I mean. It has certainly come off the shelf now and then over the years, and I’ve poked around in it. One or two of the stories therein are among my favorites by Bradbury; I’ve read them many times, even taught them. But I’d never revisited the vast majority of the tales in “Long After Midnight.” I had no memory of what most of them were about.

My search for literary comfort food was over.

In the next couple of days I re-read “Long After Midnight” straight through. It proved to be an odd experience—exhilarating at times, exciting, amusing, sometimes disappointing, and occasionally downright baffling.

For “Long After Midnight” is later Bradbury, not the Bradbury of the early classics. This often seems to be something considered almost unmentionable, but the truth is, like many first-rank artists, Ray Bradbury had a finite period of greatness. It began in the mid-1940s, as he commenced writing his initial series of peerless horror tales (“The Small Assassin,” “The Emissary,” countless others), and ended in the mid-1950s—say the late 1950s, if one wants to be generous. Everything that followed proved to be mere postscript.

If that sounds unnecessarily harsh, it isn’t meant to be; I’m in no way saying that Bradbury wrote nothing of quality in the past half-century. But literary genius does tend to have an expiration date. Yes, Henry James managed to have an early, middle, and late period, and created masterpieces in all of them; but far more common is the writer who burns brightly for a few years and then sinks back into lesser work. Ernest Hemingway is a classic example of the phenomenon. So is my favorite playwright in the world, Tennessee Williams, whose great period exactly coincided with Bradbury’s. Arthur Miller, too. In fact, most writers with major reputations and long careers build those reputations in relatively brief periods when they create the works by which they will be remembered.

Ray Bradbury will not be remembered by the material in “Long After Midnight,” but the strengths and weaknesses of the volume seem to me to reveal much about Bradbury as a writer.

There are twenty-two stories in “Long After Midnight.” Here is the Table of Contents:

The Blue Bottle
One Timeless Spring
The Parrot Who Met Papa
The Burning Man
A Piece of Wood
The Messiah
G.B.S.—Mark V
The Utterly Perfect Murder
Punishment Without Crime
Getting Through Sunday Somehow
Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds
Interval in Sunlight
A Story of Love
The Wish
Forever and the Earth
The Better Part of Wisdom
Darling Adolf
The Miracles of Jamie
The October Game
The Pumpernickel
Long After Midnight
Have I Got a Chocolate Bar For You!

When reading through this collection it’s frequently obvious, even without looking up the copyright dates, which stories were new to this mid-’70s volume and which were leftover tales from his earlier period. “Long After Midnight” begins with “The Blue Bottle,” a curious choice, since it’s clearly an old one (from 1950, in fact), and not especially strong. The main appeal of the tale is that it reads almost like a story cut from “The Martian Chronicles.” On the dead Mars of the future two Earthmen, Craig and Beck, search for the possibly mythological “blue bottle,” made by Martians of Martian glass, and said to have the ability to grant its holder any wish. The story’s setting is not quite that of “The Martian Chronicles”—mention is made of how, after the First Industrial Invasion of Mars, the human race “moved on toward the stars.” But the description of the fragile glass cities and the ancient Martian civilization can’t help but toss anyone familiar with the “Chronicles” back to that world:

“Under the cool double moons of Mars the midnight cities were bone and dust. Along the scattered highway the landcar bumped and rattled, past cities where the fountains, the gyrostats, the furniture, the metal-singing books, the painting lay powdered over with mortar and insect wings. Past cities that were cities no longer, but only things rubbed to a fine silt that flowed senselessly back and forth on the wine winds between one land and another, like the sand in a gigantic hourglass, endlessly pyramiding and repyramiding.”

The narrative voice is unmistakable, and “The Blue Bottle” is beautifully written; but in the end it’s clear enough why Bradbury didn’t make a few simple adjustments to the tale and retrofit it into “The Martian Chronicles.” It just isn’t that memorable. As a result, “Long After Midnight” kicks off on an odd note, a nostalgic one, but not one all that lasting. (This is doubly puzzling because for some reason, later in the book appears one of Bradbury’s best-known horror tales, “The October Game”—it would have made a far more powerful opening. But it’s strange that this oft-anthologized tale is there at all; it’s the only well-known story in the collection, and even in 1976 was available in many other places.)

But it’s when we get to the current stories, those written in the latter ’60s and early ’70s, that “Long After Midnight” gets into some of its deepest trouble.

Mind you, there are certainly some good stories among the later ones here. “The Utterly Perfect Murder” is a gem, a tale of a middle-aged man who returns to his home town to settle an old score and is horrified by what he finds there. “Punishment Without Crime” is also very good, a virtual sequel to Bradbury’s famous “Marionettes, Inc.,” in which a man “murders” a perfect replica of his wife—a replica created for exactly that purpose—and then discovers things working out quite differently from what he’d expected. “Interval in Sunlight,” the longest story in the book, is an incisive and disturbing psychological study of what today would be called a codependent relationship—a marriage in which abuser and abused seem hopelessly locked together for all time.

But many of the later efforts suffer from the usual problems of Bradbury’s post-1950s writing—slight story concepts, sloppy sentimentality, overworked metaphors, overwrought prose. Nowhere are these difficulties more obvious than in “A Story of Love” (a tale whose bad title tells you something important about what’s to follow). This effort is set in Bradbury’s legendary Green Town, and details the burgeoning love of schoolboy Bob Spaulding for his new teacher, Ann Taylor—and, perhaps, her love for him. (Don’t worry; this being Bradbury in his sentimental mode, nothing icky will happen.) The story opens with…well, allow me to simply quote the second paragraph:

“Everyone remembered Ann Taylor, for she was that teacher for whom all the children wanted to bring huge oranges or pink flowers, and for whom they rolled up the rustling green and yellow maps of the world without being asked. She was that woman who always seemed to be passing by on days when the shade was green under the tunnel of oaks and elms in the old town, her face shifting with the bright shadows as she walked, until it was all things to all people. She was the fine peaches of summer in the snow of winter, and she was cool milk for cereal on a hot early-June morning. Whenever you needed an opposite, Ann Taylor was there. And those rare few days in the world when the climate was balanced as fine as a maple leaf between winds that blew just right, those were the days like Ann Taylor, and should have been so named on the calendar.”

Whoo, boy.

There are several words I can think of to describe this kind of prose. One would be “purple.” Another: “fey.” A third: “Please-stop-writing-like-this-or-I-will-start-screaming.”

Okay, I cheated on that last one.

Alas, this kind of flowery, pseudo-lyrical balderdash mars many of the stories in “Long After Midnight,” and reminds me why I stopped reading Bradbury’s newer work many years ago. The Bradbury of the early 1950s would never have allowed many of these stories into print, or at least he would have excised much of the windy emptiness of the prose.

I don’t know what I thought of such prose then, in 1976, when I took the volume home and read it cover to cover. I remember that I was disappointed with the book as a whole, even as I liked some of the individual stories: overall, it didn’t seem a waste of my $7.95-plus-tax, even as I recognized that it was a far cry from the great Bradbury books I’d previously encountered. A few of the stories, like the aforementioned “Interval in Sunlight,” must have gone over my head—I doubt I understood much of what Bradbury was writing about. Others contained references I couldn’t possibly have grasped, as with “G.B.S.—Mark V,” about a robot George Bernard Shaw, or “Forever and the Earth,” about a space-age resurrection of Thomas Wolfe. I’m quite sure I’d never heard of those people then, and as a result Bradbury’s tributes to them couldn’t have meant anything to me.

But other stories, many of them, failed for me then for the same reasons they fail today: Slightness, soppiness, overwriting to the point of absurdity. One more painful example will suffice, this from “The Better Part of Wisdom”—and keep in mind as you read it that this is actually appears in the dialogue. Yes, a human being is supposed to be saying these words, in which an old man remembers a brief childhood friendship:

“We walked the shore, and that’s all there was, the simple thing of us upon the shore, and building castles or climbing hills to fight wars among the mounds. We found an old round tower and yelled up and down from it. But mostly it was walking, our arms around each other like twins born in a tangle, never cut free by knife or lightning. I inhaled, he exhaled. Then he breathed and I was the sweet chorus…We found ourselves laid out with sweet hilarity, eyes tight, gripped to each other’s shaking, and the laugh jumped free like one silver trout following another. God, I bathed in his laughter as he bathed in mine, until we were weak as if love had put us to the slaughter and exhaustions. We panted then like pups in hot summer, empty of laughing, and sleepy with friendship. And the weather for that week was blue and gold, no clouds, no rain, and a wind that smelled of apples, but no, only that boy’s wild breath."

I read somewhere that when W.H. Auden was unhappy with something he read, he would tell the author: “I’m sorry, my dear, but it won’t do.”

This writing won’t do.

Then, to be perfectly honest—and I know this will be sacrilege to some—I have never liked or responded to Bradbury’s writings about children. Again and again when reading books like “Dandelion Wine” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” I find myself shaking my head in disbelief at how the children are portrayed. (For a quick refresher course in the weird unreality of Bradbury’s child characters, take a gander at the 1980s movie adaptation of “Something Wicked,” which he scripted. One cannot envy the lot of the kids in the film who were made to utter that dialogue.) No, it won’t do. Children don’t think like that, they don’t talk like that, they don’t act like that. The children in Bradbury’s stories aren’t children, they are a grown man’s gauzy and rose-colored recollection of what it is to be a child. It rings false every time, just as those lines from “The Better Part of Wisdom” do.

Other stories in “Long After Midnight,” while not filled with the kind of wild rhetorical buzzkill I’ve just quoted, are poor simply because they’re so slight, so trivial. “Darling Adolf,” “The Miracles of Jamie,” and “Have I Got a Chocolate Bar For You!” fit into this camp, tales so flimsy that one wonders why Bradbury bothered to write them and, having written them, why he bothered to publish them.

And yet there are also moments in “Long After Midnight” which amaze and exhilarate.

“The Burning Man” is another gem, a brief story which asks “if there is such a thing as genetic evil in the world,” and delivers a memorably ghastly answer. (This story was adapted, and quite well, into one of the few worthwhile segments of the 1980s “Twilight Zone” revival series.)

“The Pumpernickel” is a lovely, low-key tale about a man’s memories which reminds me of some of Bernard Malamud’s classic short works.

And then there is the title story, which is both grim and unforgettable. “Long After Midnight” opens with several policemen and paramedics at a cliff, where they make a grisly discovery:

“The slender weight was a girl, no more than nineteen, in a light green gossamer party frock, coat and shoes lost somewhere in the cool night, who had brought a rope up to these cliffs and found a tree with a branch half over the cliff and tied the rope in place and made a loop for her neck and let herself out on the wind to hang there swinging. The rope made a dry scraping whine on the branch, until the police came, and the ambulance, to take her down out of space and place her on the ground.”

These grizzled professionals speculate a bit about the girl as they cut her down, load her dead body into the ambulance, and drive off into the night toward the morgue. Little else happens in the story.

…Little else, that is, except a final sudden revelation which changes—or possibly does not change—the men’s entire perspective, and ours, on what has happened, and what it means.

When I got to the end of this powerful and indescribably moving tale back in 1976, when I was all of fourteen, I knew I’d read something I would never forget. And I never have. “Long After Midnight,” the story, made me think differently about some very important things in life and society.

What things?

Well, you’ll have to read the story for yourself.

And so in “Long After Midnight,” the collection, Bradbury’s magic still works, if only sputteringly, sporadically. Thirty-five years later, I’ve discovered that I was both very wrong about these stories and very right: the worst are worse than I remembered, the best better than I’d dared hope.

In any event, this volume of literary comfort food—my first new hardcover, my first signed book—will, barring fire or flood, retain its place of honor in the basement library until, I suppose, my dying day. I don’t know if I’ll ever read it straight through again. But from time to time I’ll bring it down from the shelves and find my way to the pages, and there are many of them, that let me remember Bradbury as he once was—and, by 1976, still occasionally could be.

On the cover of this book, above Ray Bradbury's name, is written this line: "The World's Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer." This edition was published in 1976, so this may have been true then (although I'm sure there are many that would disagree with the "greatest"), but now that Ray Bradbury has died, we may say he was our greatest...what? He wrote more than science fiction. He wrote tales of horror ("The October Game"), of summer loves and losses, and of fantasy and witchery. So, like Kurt Vonnegut, there was no easy box to put him into, and so into the science fiction box he and Vonnegut went. Hopefully, now that he, like Venus, has passed before the face of the sun and off into the universe, he can be let out of that box and allowed to inhabit the multiverse of the written word- he was one of our greatest.

I read: The Blue Bottle, One Timeless Spring
The Parrot Who Met Papa
A Piece of Wood
Punishment Without Crime
Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds
Interval in Sunlight
A Story of Love
The Wish (REREAD)
Forever & the Earth (REREAD)
- The Better Part of Wisdom
- The October Game
- Long After Midnight
- Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!

Podéis escuchar una reseña de los mejores relatos de esta antología en el segundo programa de ¡Silba y Acudiremos!, Día de difuntos: https://go.ivoox.com/rf/135394145

Ray Bradbury, poeta de la ciencia ficción, es alguien incapaz de escribir un cuento malo. Incluso la más mediocre de sus ficciones, entendiendo mediocre como "en la mediania" y no por de mala calidad, tiene pasajes memorables. Y es que es cuestión de estilo. Hay cuentos de Bradbury que apenas pueden considerarse tales, sino más bien episodios, anécdotas, escenas aisladas que evocan un claro sentimiento: nostalgia, melancolía, inocencia. Bradbury escribe como un adulto que rememorase una infancia que nunca existió, porque es una infancia conceptual y universal. Leyendo sus cuentos todos nos sentimos un poco niños con pantalones cortos. Incluso en aquellos relatos terroríficos hay un tenue poso de ese estilo tan reconocible, tan sencillo y tan honesto. Lo que Bradbury hace con las palabras es algo que está al alcance de muy pocos narradores, y que, a mi juicio, solo autores como Gabriel García Márquez, Isak Dinesen y José María Merino pueden lograr, a saber, hipnotizar con la palabra escrita.

Por supuesto que esta antología de relatos no está a la altura de Crónicas Marcianas, Remedio para melancólicos o Las doradas manzanas del sol, pero es que tampoco lo estaría Del amor y otros demonios si lo comparamos a 100 años de soledad. Ya le gustaría a más de uno escribir historias ni la mitad de buena de las obras menores de estos autores.

Esta antología se compone de los siguientes relatos:

La botella azul (***): en un Marte antaño colonizado y ahora deshabitado, dos hombres caminan por ciudades abandonadas en busca de una botella cuyo líquido cumple los deseos más íntimos de aquel que lo beba.

Una primavera intemporal (***): el pequeño protagonista de este relato se niega a comer, se niega a aprender nada en la escuela, no quiere saber nada de los adultos: piensa que está siendo envenenado, que lo están forzando a dejar de ser lo que es.

El loro que conoció a papa (****): En Cuba, unos ladrones han robado el loro de un famoso bar. ¿Por qué? Pues porque ese loro era el confidente de Hemingway, el último que escuchó los desvaríos etílicos del escritor antes de suicidarse y que, como buen imitador, atesora cada palabra en su cerebro de pájaro.

El hombre ardiente (***): un niño y su tía viajan en coche por la carretera hasta que se topan con un autoestopista, al que recogen. Ya en el vehículo en marcha, el extraño les empezará a hablar de unas incomprensibles profecías y del mal en la Tierra.

Un pedazo de madera (****): en un contexto de guerra mundial, un oficial de alto rango pide al protagonista que se reincorpore al servicio activo. Este, en cambio, rehusa, no sin antes explicar a su superior sus ideales pacifistas y un método de su invención mediante el cual acabar con todas las guerras.

El mesías (****): de nuevo en el Marte de Bradbury, un rabino, un cura católico y un pastor protestante festejan juntos y hablan sobre la posible llegada a su localidad de un representante del pueblo nativo del planeta rojo.

G.B.S.: modelo V (***): en una nave espacial, los tripulantes se divierten y matan el rato con sus robopilinguis, todos excepto uno, que prefiere pasar las horas muertas conversando con el sosias mecánico del dramaturgo George Bernard Shaw. Pronto algunos miembros de la tripulación no verán con buenos ojos esta relación.

El crimen totalmente perfecto (****): a sus 48 años, un hombre se decide a asesinar al hombre que de niño le amargó la infancia, que le pegaba, le insultaba y le humillaba. Cuando se dispone a llevar a cabo su venganza descubrirá que alguien se le ha adelantado.

Castigo sin crimen (***): en un futuro, las personas podrán contratar a una empresa la creación de un conocido para asesinarlo sin consecuencias penales. El protagonista acude porque quiere un doble de su mujer adúltera para desquitarse.

Pasando el domingo de alguna manera (**): según Bradbury, los domingos dublineses son plomizos e insoportables. Para matar el rato, el protagonista sale de su hotel y se pasea por las calles de la capital irlandesa, hasta que se topa con una músico callejero.

Bebida total: contra la locura de las multitudes (****): en una noche de calor sofocante, el protagonista, incapaz de dormir, opta por vagabundear por las calles de Nueva York. Al girar por una calle se topa con una tienda con un extraño pero sugerente rótulo, una invitación a solucionar todos sus problemas. Dentro, la dependienta pide al protagonista algo a cambio de tanta felicidad y poder: su alma.

Intervalo a la luz del sol (****): una insoportable pareja, marido y mujer, pasan sus vacaciones en México. El marido no deja de quejarse por la torpeza de su pareja y los muchos errores que comete a lo largo del viaje. La mujer, aunque una completa inepta, terminará harta de su marido. Y con razón.

Historia de amor (****): una joven profesora llega al instituto del pueblo, y su alumno de trece años se enamora de ella. Sí, habéis leído esta historia mil veces, pero nunca contada por Bradbury.

El deseo (***): en una noche en que una implacable ventisca azota las casas, un hombre pide un deseo antes de media noche: que su padre vuelva a la vida una hora, solo una hora.

Para siempre y la Tierra (****): en el 2300, un viejo magnate quema toda su obra escrita al darse cuenta de que es incapaz de plasmar el mundo de adelantos tecnológicos y conquista espacial en que vive. Aceptando sus limitaciones, decide utilizar su riqueza para traer del pasado al único hombre capaz de hacerlo: Thomas Wolfe.

La mejor parte de la sabiduría (****): un anciano aprovecha sus últimos meses de vida y visita a su nieto. Al llegar a su casa, lo encuentra junto con su compañero sentimental. Pese a lo que el nieto y su compañero temen, el anciano, haciéndose el sueco, pasará una encantadora última velada con su nieto.

Querido Adolf (***): durante la grabación de una película biográfica sobre Adolf Hitler, el actor principal se mete demasiado en su personaje, dando muestra de la misma ambición y vehemencia que manifestara el Furher en vida. A estos arrebatos no se prestará el director, judío a la sazón.

Los milagros de Jamie (****): el pequeño Jamie se ha convencido de que hace milagros, de que gracias a su fuerza de voluntad y pequeños juegos que se plantea, como cruzar la esquina antes que un coche de su elección, el mundo es el mejor de los mundos posibles. Por supuesto, la vida hará tambalear sus convicciones.

El juego de octubre (****): un padre de familia se obsesiona con que su mujer le odia después de que este le obligara a tener hijos. Durante la noche de Halloween idea la mejor forma de vengarse de su mujer.

El pan de centeno (***): ya en su madurez, el protagonista recuerda a sus amigos de la infancia y la promesa que se hicieron antes de separarse de mantenerse, en la distancia, juntos, unidos por un vínculo simbólico en la forma de un pan de centeno.

Mucho después de medianoche (****): una noche, una muchacha pone fin a su vida ahorcándose de un árbol. El más joven de los enfermeros que acuden a retirar el cadaver no puede soportar la frialdad con que tratan el cuerpo y les enfrenta.

Una tableta de chocolate (****): en un tórrido y asfixiante verano, un cura acepta en confesión a un inusual penitente, uno que busca desesperadamente su ayuda y consejo porque, dice, no puede parar de comer chocolate.

Description: In twenty-two stories of amazing range and variety, Ray Bradbury once again works his special magic, sounding out life's mysteries in the past, present, and the future.

"The Blue Bottle"
"One Timeless Spring"

"The Parrot Who Met Papa": amusing story with many lit references

"The Burning Man"
"A Piece of Wood"
"The Messiah"
"G.B.S.-Mark V"
"The Utterly Perfect Murder"
"Punishment Without Crime"
"Getting Through Sunday Somehow"
"Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds"
"Interval in Sunlight"
"A Story of Love"
"The Wish"
"Forever and the Earth"
"The Better Part of Wisdom"
"Darling Adolf"
"The Miracles of Jamie"
"The October Game"
"The Pumpernickel"
"Long After Midnight"
"Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!"

From wiki: Several of the stories are original to this collection. Others originally appeared in the magazines Planet Stories, Collier's Weekly, Playboy, Esquire, Welcome Aboard, Other Worlds, Cavalier, Gallery, McCall's, Woman's Day, Harper's, Charm, Weird Tales, Eros, and Penthouse.

All round, a smashing encounter. Fully recommended.




Halloween 2015 reads:

#1: 3* Nobody True by James Herbert: fraudio
#2: TR The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: fraudio
#3: AB Brain Child by John Saul: fraudio
#4: 3* Domain (Rats #3) by James Herbert: fraudio
#5: CR The Mourning Vessels by Peter Luther: paperback
#6: 2* The Doom of the Great City: ebook short-story
#7: 5* Long After Midnight by Ray Bradbury: fraudio
#8: The Dead Zone by Stephen King: fraudio
#9 The Chalice: hardback
#10 7 Gothic Tales: ebook



4* The Martian Chronicles
4* Fahrenheit 451

5* Dandelion Wine (Green Town, #1)
4* Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town, #2)

5* The Illustrated Man
TR I Sing the Body Electric! & Other Stories
4* The October Country
4* The Golden Apples of the Sun
3* A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories
4* Stories of Ray Bradbury
4* Death Is a Lonely Business
3* Farewell Summer
5* Long After Midnight
2* A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (Crumley Mysteries, #2)
TR Driving Blind
TR The Day It Rained Forever
3* The Fog Horn
4* Selected from Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed
3* Bradbury Thirteen
5* Fantastic Tales of Ray Bradbury
4* The Smile