There isn't as much moral ambiguity in the remaining stories as in
The Dwarf. I finished the book fast but put off writing this because I knew it'd take a while (and spent a lot of time bashing
A Court of Thorns and Roses in the let's read, because I thought that wouldn't take time, I'd just have a look at the funny thread...)
The Next in Line
`pink as women's hidden wonders` -- oh come on I didn't expect coomshit there. It's not appropriate for the story, either, the story is largely written from Marie's point of view.
Marie weirdly blames water for aging and death (`how quickly a vessel stores self-destroying water in its cells`). Ironically the mummies are dried. Echoes of Skeleton in this, a person freaked out by something natural about his/her own body.
Marie: "I don't mind skulls and bones... If a child was raised and didn't know he had a skeleton in him, he wouldn't think anything of bones, would he?" -- also echoes of Skeleton.
So they get stuck. There's a gas station and a garage, there must be more cars in the town than just the 1927 Ford and theirs. They could've gotten towed.
Poor Marie. She didn't deserve this. Yes she went a little bit not right in the head, but it's not her fault, it's not a virtue to find mummified bodies entertaining. Joseph is a monster. I'd like to think they didn't bury her deep (knowing Joseph won't return) and she can dig herself out.
The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse
Brilliantly prescient SCI-FI which explains why "ironic" content creators become genuine lolcows. Even though Garvey started out producing "organic" content as a byproduct of his own ultra-normie life, chasing the pre-Internet equivalent of clicks and upboats turns him into hs old self's opposite, a bizarre mutilated attention whore (with a name change, symbolizing the destruction of self).
The Cellar Septet are quintessential cowtippers.
"Ulysses? Wasn't that the book about the Greek, the ship, and the one-eyed monster?" -- ultra based.
`It was arranged to tape-record various daytime soap operas...` -- reaction videos/streams.
`Suddenly he was just another person, no longer diverting the tastes of friends, but frantically pursuing them as they seized at Noray Bayes...`: this is (1) ironic liking and (2) strip-mining culture.
`At long last, Garvey was forced to turn to a series of miraculous tours de force...`: streamers trying to hold attention
`accident`, `the next day`, `subconscious`: no, he'd seen the metal finger and decided to cut off his finger on purpose.
Wife: "It's a much nicer finger now than any of us can _ever_ have. (...) And George has the _right_ to use it.": exploiting disability for attention
Then he destroys his eye. Tee hee, what a happy accident. And then, possibly (see the intro), a leg and a hand.
Skeleton
This is every troon "hon"'s story except it's not the dick the protagonist has removed:
- married man with a good job
- vague discontent
- "aches in your bones" is to bone removal as erectile dysfunction in middle age is to trooning out
- creepy, secretly monstrous quack focusing the patient's discomfort on his special interest
- "an unsympathetic coordination between soul, flesh and skeleton" == mismatch between "gender" and sex
- ready to operate at once!
- "All these years I've gone around with a--SKELETON--inside me! How is it we take ourselves for granted? How is it we never question our bodies and our being?" == explore your gender
- having second thoughts ("he wondered briefly of a lot of blame couldn't be put on M. Munigant's shoulders. After all, it was Munigant who'd first drawn specific attention to his skeleton...")
- turns into a repulsive slug and destroys his marriage
The Jar
OK I didn't get this one, it's just IRL crime. Autistic man murders his wife, puts her remains on display, (hopefully gets arrested and executed).
The Lake
I didn't like this one either, mostly because the language is (probably intentionally, because the guy is also stuck in the past despite having grown) too simple and childlike.
The Emissary
Very sad and very beautiful, a dark jewel of a story. Two complaints, though:
- why doesn't anyone take the boy outside? If he absolutely had to stay in the room, they wouldn't allow the Dog in. Clearly a lot of people care about him including Mom, not just Miss Haight, and still he's stuck inside.
- `Martin had company.` is NOT a beautiful ending, it makes me think of terrible capeshit movies. "We've got company!" I know it's supposed to echo Miss Haight's previous (living) visit, but when I read the story, I forgot about that first line and only spotted it just now looking up a quote.
I wonder if he had some kind of serious contagious disease that ultimately killed Miss Haight and that's part of why people were reluctant to come visit him.
Miss Haight was "killed in an auto accident a mile out of town". (Also, Mom is with Martin and is alive and well.)
Touched with Fire
A weird reddit-esque story. "Everyone sucks here." It reads like a fantasy on part of the two retired insurance salesmen (you know they suck). Meanwhile, the woman got married, bred, and her daughter got married, too!
"A murderer passing one of these accident-prones, these wishers-after-death..." -- are they selling rabid nog insurance?
Then the faggots come into her home, refuse to leave, and assault her. Quintessential redditors, and the baby was Albert Einstein.
The Small Assassin
or, BEHEAD THE_RAPISTS
David Leiber is Joseph-level shitty and he deserved to die. Your wife appears to have postpartum depression. HIRE A FUCKING NANNY!
"I must fly to Chicago Friday... I've put this trip off for two months..." -- plenty of time to find a nanny!
"Does a baby know the difference between right and wrong?" -- eckshually yes. There are some quacky-sounding studies which allege babies react to pantomimes acted out with toys and thereafter prefer "good" toys to "bad" toys, but from the moment of birth, the baby is being cared for and internalizes help, warmth, comfort, food = good.
"If she doesn't come around in the next month or so, ask me. I'll recommend a good psychiatrist." -- yay the rapy!
`When summer came, things seemes to settle...` -- ok is the baby still unnamed? And still no nanny.
Alice: "I want to go on a vacation..."
Faggot husband: "The only thing you're going to do is see a good psychiatrist. And if he suggests a vacation, well, okay."
Her head was down; she was trying to blink back tears.
Then Alice dies in an "accident" and David Leiber goes on a long, unhinged rant about murderer babies, and what does Dr. Jeffers offers him?
"It was a good morning, and he was here to drive Leiber to the country for a rest."
FUCKING LOOK AT THIS! A VACATION! NO THE RAPY, A FUCKING VACATION!
The final scene doesn't add anything to the story, it should've ended with Jeffers discovering the fag's death, or worst case the baby's involvement. There's no suspense here, Jeffers will win unless the baby blows up the house.
The Crowd
These days, The Crowd has smartphones.
Jack-in-the-Box
"Cool story bro." Nah, I don't think this works. You're supposed to guess what's happening early on, and it's not even remotely plausible. Living self-sufficiently somewhere in the wilderness and Mom saying the whole world ended and everyone's dead, yes. Living in a mansion in town, hell no. (And who wrote and modified all those books? `Pages razored, clipped, some books glued tight...` -- this is A LOT of work. Mom could have censored books one by one and gave them to Edwin, but him having access to a free-roam library of thoroughly censored books isn't remotely realistic.
The Scythe
"A house had flamed and fallen and still they lived, caught halfway, not dead, not alive. Simply--waiting."
The first twist is dumb. This topic has been handled many times by several civilizations (!).
Quite a few of the stories are dumb, e.g. Eos and her boyfriend. "Death" does not exist. Death is just decay from which modern science cannot recover.
A better story is getting severely hurt and suffering for all eternity. Bradbury does the opposite (mindless but perfectly preserved bodies) and it doesn't work.
First, it's dumb. Why would they brain-die? There must be another supernatural death mechanic, other than the wheat (which is still uncut), that made them brain-die.
Second, it's not even horrifying! It's strictly better than the alternative of dying in the fire in pain and horror!
The second twist is hilarious and original, but also dumb. Why should reaping cause falling bombs? When he did not reap, the fire still happened. Seems like young people should be dropping dead for no visible reason instead. And on the flipside, someone getting blown up by a bomb should be "ripe", even if he or she is young, just like the man's children were ripe. Second, he's cutting green wheat "instead of" the ripe: nuclear war isn't easier on the elderly, they should still be dying. There were no intact elderly catalepsy sufferers (unharvested ripe wheat) in the ruins of Hiroshima.
Uncle Einar
`Before you'd say "Uncle Einar has green wings" he sailed low across his farmland...` -- I was wondering if Uncle Einar might be an existing folklore character. Apparently not (?)
Wikipedia says
One of two stories in this collection to feature members of the Elliott family, a collection of movie monsters and immortal beings. This story focuses on a character named Uncle Einar, who tries to find a way into the skies after damaging his biological radar.
-- but I'll get to this in the respective section.
"How can I go to Europe? If I flew by day, I'd be seen and--miserable joke--maybe shot down!" -- why? Just fly higher. A reminder, he can "sail[ed] over islands of cloud" and cross oceans. The greatest danger is radar and it works at night. Anyway, the story has a happy ending, so I won't pick on the inconsistencies.
The Wind
"You'll forget about the Himalayas and the Valley of the Winds and this preoccupation of yours with storms and hurricanes." holy exposition, this is awkward.
I also don't get this one. It's like The Crowd except the guy in The Crowd is not yet completely dead when we last see him, and after death, presumably, he's absorbed into its collective evil spirit. Here the dead on the wind are so evil that they'd chase Allin across the world and torment and finally murder him, but the dead Allin is nice.
The Man Upstairs
I'd read this one as a kid (and The Dwarf, and Skeleton) but unlike the other two, it didn't impress me.
It's got the colored glass from The Strawberry Window (which is AMAZING) but it's sinister instead.
I think the story would be vastly improved as horror if there were no suspicious deaths in the town and Koberman didn't kill anyone and got murdered simply for being an extradimensional alien with some traits pop culture ascribes to vampires, and you can certainly say the text as is doesn't contradict it, but the way the discussion about the deaths is written, I just can't make myself believe it, it's easier to believe Marie dug herself out of the grave than that Koberman is innocent.
There Was an Old Woman
Another take on cheating death. This time it's humorous, and it doesn't work either. So the four workers take Aunt Tildy's body to the mortuary. Are they supernatural or not? If they are, they can't be doing it, normal mortuary workers do it to dead people's bodies; Aunt Tildy's death was a normal regular person's death, not a supernatural death, we just got to see the spiritual side of it. But if they're normal humans, they can't be Death's servants in the first scene.
The Cistern
I don't really get this story. If anything I empathize with Juliet, it must be pretty creepy to realize the person you care about is bugfuck insane. When Anna says "they're dead", I first assumed undead, but then she's like "ahh sexy corpses".
In contrast to Marie, in Anna's fantasies water is nice to corpses, it's life-giving.
Homecoming
Wikipedia says in Uncle Einar the Elliott family is "a collection of movie monsters and immortal beings". I don't really get "movie monsters" from Bradbury's prose, it's prose. The Addams family can be said to be movie monsters, they're comic characters and there's a visual resemblance.
(Charles Addams drew the cover for Homecoming!)
I especially like how, throughout the stories, he rarely names the monsters explicitly. Characters might speculate about vampires or whatever but by not confirming anything it helps keep the story from feeling too corny.
Yes!
`He stood very straight and thought of nothing, ot at least thought of thinking nothing.` -- this is a very observant remark.
`Great-great-great-great and a thousand more great-greats Grandmother was there, wrapped in Egyptian cerements.` -- nah, an Egyptian grandma is at most a couple hundred greats.
Normie among monsters is a comedic scenario, Bradbury makes it sad and poignant. I love Timothy's relationship with Cecy in particular, her life (unlife?) isn't easy either.
But, in light of the first story, Timothy has a chance to live as a normal human: if even Uncle Einar can get married to a normie and the family doesn't mind, Timothy can just go and be a normie with weird relatives. But growing up is still hard.
The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone
This is a great story with so many excellent passages. I don't have a single note on this, just highlights. If I have to complain about anything, it's that there's no suspense, we know Dudley's all right. It could've been that John Oatis got even more enraged by Dudley giving up writing like it was nothing, it could've been that his wife preferred the famous author after all and dumped him. Instead, he's happy and well and we know it from the beginning.
The second and third Black Company book
Oh god, they're terrible. I was going to rant about them but I was already late with this book report. Sure, read them, but what a goddamn letdown.
