I'm such a fan of mister Bradbury's since my childhood that I have troubles being objective but here's another set of stories that are like precious jewels. His writing style, full of poetry, nostalgia and humanism is as beautiful as usual.

I loved this short story collection. Ray Bradbury is such a kind writer and you can tell he loves his characters. And his writing is exquisite.

MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING: The title story of this collection is MASSIVELY TRANSPHOBIC. I actually pondered if I should even mention it, because some people might read it out of curiosity and be hurt, but I ultimately figured it's better than having some unsuspecting trans person or ally innocently wandering into what they think is going to be a science fiction story and being hit in the face with this vileness.

PLEASE spare yourself this vile story.

My thoughts are quite conflicted with this short story collection from Ray Bradbury. Every story is written exceptionally well. I've previously read his novel Farenheit 451 which I thought was written well but the mastery he has over the short story form is incredible. Everything is very economical, with descriptions only being given where necessary and the majority of each story being filled with dialogue. A few stories, however, really didn't work for me. A couple such as Drink Entire and Interval In Sunlight just weren't for me but it was A Story Of Love that I had the most issues with as there was this fetishisation of a relationship with a minor that made for an incredibly uncomfortable read (hopefully I just interpreted it wrongly).

My favourite stories from this were: The Blue Bottle, Forever and The Earth, The Parrot Who Met Papa and The October Game.

While this short story collection has a couple of gooduns, most of the stories in this collection have the same problem: they are forgettable.

Often times the writing itself is good, but the trajectory of the story is indiscernible; leading to an anxiety of where the story is headed, only to be resolved with the fact that it doesn't really go anywhere. Sometimes the good writing covers for the doldrum plot, but too many of the stories just don't quite land. One of my favorite qualities of short story science fictions are those tales that leave you something to chew on; an action or consequence that leaves you thinking on it for weeks, months, or years. I'm not sure if any stories in this collection get to that depth, instead furthering forgettable plot lines into forgettable stories.

That being said, the stories aren't all bad. Perhaps related to my "meandering plot lines" critique, several stories dwell on the wistful nostalgia of youth, some more enjoyably than others. "Interval in Sunlight" stood out as a hauntingly written tale of a co-dependent relationship, and several other tales fit nicely into a perfectly entertaining chilling/haunting tale. I'm not sure these tales are good enough to be the "gems" that make the rest of the collection worth reading, but with tempered expectations you'll encounter some enjoyable stories along the way.

I normally LOVE Bradbury, but this collection fell kinda short. I couldn’t connect with many of the short stories at all, and most of them were forgettable. So sad because I usually adore Bradbury’s work. Would actually give about 2.5 stars.

This is one of the first short story collections I've read and the first thing I have ever picked up from Ray Bradbury. I truly enjoyed so many stories in this book. There are some beautiful conversations on what it means to be whole, the vastness of time, and the nuances of sexuality. Some of these stories feel far ahead of their time I will definitely be revisiting my favorites.

Dels pocs llibres de contes que m'han agradat. Em sembla un llibre perfecte si es vol començar a llegir ciència-ficció.
I si se n'ha llegit molta, imprescindible.

My well read copy is the 1976 one with the fantastic cover art. The stories are already published in magazines mostly from 1950. We get a couple of really good horror stories. A few Scifi. The rest are general fiction.
Some that stood out for me : The Utterly Perfect Murder. What if you could go back to your old hometown & kill your adolescent nemesis?
Interval In Sun about an abusive relationship.
A Story Of Love. Adolescent boy in love with his teacher.
The Better Part Of Wisdom. A dying grandfather visiting his grandson.
Although there are some gems, for the most part, these stories were just ok.

Ray Bradbury has written some of my favorite books, including short story collections, but I just couldn't get into "Long After Midnight." There are some good stories here, but there were also some I just didn't care for. Still, it's Bradbury, so maybe I'm being too critical. His warm, nostalgic manner shines through, whether he's speculating about space travel or remembering childhood, and his sparse, rhetorical writing style remains almost poetic.

Wow, I was really struck by how misogynistic some of these stories were! Normally it doesn't bother me -- cultural relativism and all -- but for some reason this collection was distracting in its sexism. That said, it was surprisingly empathetic in its treatment of LGBT issues.

That said, there were a few gems (namely, The October Game) in what was otherwise, sadly, a collection of clunkers. Is this what happens when famous authors need to fill up a collection and use old stuff that wasn't good enough to be published the first time around?

Individual Ratings Below. I was carefulish about spoilers but not overly so.

The Blue Bottle - 2/5
Kind of an interesting take on the genie mythos.

One Timeless Spring - 1/5
Women: leading men into corruption since 4000 BC.

The Parrot Who Met Papa - 0/5
Birds and Hemingway and intrigue or something. I dunno. I had a little difficulty following it and I did not particularly care enough to put the effort in.

The Burning Man - 3/5
The kind of eerie story that you might hear around a campfire.

A Piece of Wood - 2/5
Cat's Cradle's Ice-9 has a rival with a predictable fate.

The Messiah - 3/5
You came to the wrong neighborhood, goldeneyes.

G.B.S.--Mark V - 1/5
Men talking about philosophy like only real men can.

The Utterly Perfect Murder - 5/5
Revenge is a dish best with heaping spoonfuls of crazysauce.

Punishment Without Crime - 2/5
I'm not sure if the moral of this one is "violence doesn't pay," "we are moving toward an age of thoughtcrime," or "fucking bitches never get what's comin' to them."

Getting Through Sunday Somehow - 1/5
I read this yesterday and forgot about it completely.

Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds - 3/5
Reminiscent of Neil Gaiman.

Interval in Sunlight - 1/5
Like being trapped at dinner with another couple who starts fighting.

A Story of Love - 1/5
Pro: Possibly the least alarming pedophilia story I've read in recent years.

The Wish - 3/5
Very evocative of The Monkey's Paw.

Forever and the Earth - 2/5
Time travel and the power of prose.

The Better Part of Wisdom - 3/5
An unexpectedly soft and vulnerable piece.

Darling Adolph - 1/5
Need a badguy? Why not Nazis!

The Miracles of Jamie - 2/5
The sad but true process of growing up.

The October Game - 5/5
Absolutely perfect Halloween story.

The Pumpernickel - 1/5
Ray Bradbury, looking back across the years at his youth.

Long After Midnight - 3/5
Empathy.

Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You! - 1/5
Meh.

I finished Ray Bradbury's Long After Midnight and I'm not happy about it! A fascinating, thought-provoking collection of strange short stories that make you cry with every tragic ending. Though I enjoyed every single one, I was particularly moved by three of the twenty-two tales.

You come out of the dark into the light, out of the womb into the world, and what do you find that you really want? What about that dead man back there in the ditch? Wasn't he always looking for something extra? Something he didn't have. What was there for men like himself? Or for anyone? Was there anything at all to look forward to?

The Blue Bottle has to be one of my favourites. It describes the journey of two men, Beck and Craig, as they search for the legendary Blue Bottle embedded somewhere on Mars over a thousand years into the future. It is said that within the Bottle, the discoverer will find what they truly want. When Craig unearths it, he finds that it is full of bourbon whisky; however, Beck discovers death within the bottle. When Beck uncovers the bottle and realises his happy demise is imminent, he says:

So this is what all men really want? The secret desire, deep inside, hidden all away where we never guess? The subliminal urge? So this is what each man seeks, through some private guilt, to find? Death.
All men? No. Not Craig. Craig was, perhaps, far luckier. A few men were like animals in the universe, not questioning, drinking at pools and breeding and raising their young and not doubting for a moment that life was anything but good. That was Craig. There were a handful like him. Happy animals on a great reservation, in the hand of God, with a religion and a faith that grew like a set of special nerves in them. The unneurotic men in the midst of the billionfold neurotics.

The second of my three favourites was The October Game. It was dark and sinister and tragic, but Bradbury never says anything explicit about the ending of the horror story. Instead, it is heavily and darkly implied that an unloved and unloving father and husband, determined to make his wife miserable, chops up his daughter and hands her organs around at a Halloween party. While at first it seems that he is playing a nice game with the children in the dark cellar, supposedly handing around frozen chicken intestines and telling them they're the guts of a dead witch, it quickly becomes evident that his daughter is missing from the room. The final line leaves the reader gasping in shock (or I did, anyway), as a story that was almost entirely built on the reader's imagination draws to a horrific close:

Then... some idiot turned on the lights.

My third and final favourite of Bradbury's tales was A Piece of Wood. It describes how a young sergeant in the army has invented a device that turns all metal to rust—hence demolishing every gun and tank on the globe and, theoretically, bringing peace to the world. The young sergeant, named Hollis, explains how his contraption works to a more senior officer, who is incredulous and disbelieving at first.

A while later, when Hollis has gone, the senior sergeant finds that his metal pen has turned to rust. Panicking, he phones another officer, telling him to look out for the young soldier and shoot him if he sees him. The recipient of the phone call explains that he can't because his gun has turned to rust.

In the end, the older sergeant rushes out of the building and they kill young Hollis with a chair leg.

I can't get my head around the pure magical originality of Bradbury's clever stories. Can't recommend enough!