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    Quicker Than the Eye
    Quicker Than the Eye
    Quicker Than the Eye
    Audiobook7 hours

    Quicker Than the Eye

    Written by Ray Bradbury

    Narrated by Macleod Andrews

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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 links 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJan 4, 2019
    ISBN9781501981739
    Author

    Ray Bradbury

    In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. An Emmy Award winner for his teleplay The Halloween Tree and an Academy Award nominee, he was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.

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    Reviews for Quicker Than the Eye

    3.5/5

    135 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Absolutely incredible author. His short stories are second to none
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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".
    • 5/5
      These are brilliantly written short stories. I love Bradbury's black humor and his profound view of the human soul. There isn't one story falling apart. Every single one is strong and gripping. They made me smile but also lost in thought. It's a book I can strongly recommend.
    • 5/5
      Excellent Ray Bradbury collection! Ray Bradbury is a word magician. His imaginative stories always make you think and transform the ordinary into extraordinary. I've been a huge fan of his since I was a teenager! I actually read this book in 1997 but Bradbury is worth rereading at least once and maybe more.
    • 3/5
      Delightful Bradbury styled, short stories filled with everything from reality and beyond. My top two are Finnegan, spooky one, and The Very Gentle Murders, macabre tale about an elderly married couple openly plotting to assassinate each other.
    • 4/5
      Individual Summaries and Reviews: "Unterderseaboat Doktor" is a story of a man whose psychiatrist is crazier than he is... although he may have very good reasons for being so. It was severely bizarre, more so than I normally think of Bradbury being, and was hard to follow and impossible to get into. It wouldn't have been my choice to kick off the collection, that's for sure.

      "Zaharoff/Richter Mark V" was a piece describing the secret plan of architects and city planners to build metropolises where they are sure to be destroyed by acts of nature. Not really well thought-out enough to convince me that there actually is a secret evil conspiracy, which is what I want from my secret evil conspiracy stories.

      "Remember Sascha?" is a story of a couple who begin to talk to their unborn child... and the child who begins to talk back. It seemed like the story was going for a slightly menacing, creepy tone, and then the ending totally failed to deliver on that promise.

      "Another Fine Mess" is a ghost story involving a duo of very famous Hollywood ghosts who just want to be appreciated and loved. This one also didn't do much for me; the emotions felt way too overwrought to be recognizable.

      "The Electrocution" is a story of a sideshow act that becomes the stage for the working out of marital tensions. Bradbury can write carnival atmosphere like nobody's business, but I didn't really care about the central conflict of the story.

      "Hopscotch" is a tale of two young people and one perfect summer day. This is where the collection turned around for me; this one is easily my favorite. The writing is gorgeous and lyrical and evocative, and the emotions were real and immediately recognizable, although I don't know if I'm recognizing them from my own childhood summers, or from the way that Bradbury made me daydream that my childhood summers should be.

      "The Finnegan" is a historical quasi-detective story regarding the disappearance of several young children... and a doctor who thinks he know the monster that's to blame, and how to stop it. I liked this one too; Bradbury does a good job with the historical dialogue and tone, and it's effectively creepy throughout.

      "That Woman on the Lawn" is a tale of past and future colliding in a chance encounter, very very reminiscent of "Night Meeting" from The Martian Chronicles but closer to home. I guess it's a ghost story, but it's much more of the sad and wistful definition of "haunting" than the more typical horror definition.

      "The Very Gentle Murders" is the story of an elderly couple that are taking the "'til death do us part" line of their vows into their own hands. It's the only humor piece in the collection, and it's one of the standouts.

      "Quicker Than the Eye" is the story of a man who sees someone who looks identical to him being made a patsy of at a magic show. Not one of the better stories, in my opinion; I never really understood why he cared so much.

      "Dorian in Excelsus" is the idea started by "A Portrait of Dorian Grey" taken to extremes. This one fell squarely under the category of horror that I call "slimy gross-out horror," which is one that I neither care for, nor find particularly scary.

      "No News, or What Killed The Dog?" is the story of a family mourning the passing of one of their animal members. Again, Bradbury did a good job capturing the emotions, but otherwise, this story wasn't a particular stand-out for me.

      "The Witch Door" is part historical ghost story and part post-apocalyptic future story about the mysterious happenings that come along with living in an old house. It was a good idea, and the ghost story part of things was executed well, but I wish the post-apocalyptic part of things had either been developed a little more thoroughly or dropped altogether; as it was it felt somewhat incomplete.

      "The Ghost in the Machine" is another historical piece about a traveling scholar who goes to visit the village madman, who may be mad, but may also have invented a machine that could change the world. I really liked this one. It took me a long time to figure out what the machine was, but that worked in the story's favor; when the pieces finally clicked into place, I smiled throughout the rest of the story.

      "At the End of the Ninth Year" involves the idea that once every nine years, the human body has completely turned over every cell, every molecule of which it is made, and a married couple who take that notion to its logical conclusion. This one was pretty predictable, but still sweet.

      "Bug" is the story of a man who encounters a high school classmate who used to be a great dance champion but has long since given up the sport. Also predictable; less sweet.

      "Once More, Legato" tells of a struggling composer who begins hearing music in nature... real, symphonic music. I liked this one, but I found the fact that Bradbury inserted a second character, seemingly just to be able to have some of his trademark dialogue, a little out of place.

      "Exchange" involves a man who has returned to his hometown, and found that everything and everyone he expected to see has changed... except the library. Another of the winners from this collection; I think everyone reading this collection will probably relate to this story.

      "Free Dirt" involves an old graveyard, and, as the title suggests, its dirt. Another story that was aiming for creepy, and maintained that atmosphere throughout, only to be saddled with an ending that didn't live up to its potential.

      "Last Rites" is a time travel story and a love note to authors who died thinking they were unread and unloved. A good idea, only a little hampered by the fact that the favorite authors of the characters (and presumably by extension, of Bradbury's) are not the ones I would have chosen.

      "The Other Highway" is the story of a family that is drawn to take the scenic route, and must come to choose between the past and the future. This felt like vintage Bradbury in tone, atmosphere, and setting but wasn't quite all the way there in plot. I enjoyed it well enough, but it just needed a tiny little twist to make it great.

      Overall Review and Recommendation: To be clear about things, I am a Bradbury nut. I grew up reading and re-reading The Martian Chronicles over and over, had already read "The Veldt" and "The Sound of Thunder" (several times each) by the time we were assigned them in high school English classes, etc. So as I was reading the first few stories in Quicker than the Eye, Bradbury's first collection in over a decade, I was really bummed out. I wasn't liking any of them... had Bradbury lost his touch? Or had I grown out of my fandom? Then I got to "Hopscotch" and calmed down; that was the Bradbury I remembered, and the type of story I was looking for.

      This collection's not a socks-knocking winner; there are plenty of pieces here that either didn't work for me at all, or didn't work as well as I wanted them to. Still, the pieces that do work are worth the rest. Bradbury's at his best when he's telling mildly melancholic ghost stories, of which there are several, but some of his contemporary pieces work well too, and his foray into humor was highly enjoyable. Overall, while this collection doesn't show Bradbury at his best, there are still enough highlights that it'd be worthwhile for someone whose already read The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and some of his other better collections. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
    • 3/5
      It has been a long time since I read Bradbury and I had remembered him as a science fiction writer. He's actually more fantasy. Writes very well, but a number of these stories end obscurely leaving me dissatisfied. Some were brilliant. Overall an uneven book.