Quicker Than the Eye

Rating:
Summary: Bradbury's newest is nice but not his best
Review: After nearly a decade since his last short story collection (and about FIVE since his first), it's very nice to see the master back on the new book shelves. Longtime fans will recognize familiar themes such as time travel of one sort or another to make amends ("That Woman On the Lawn," "Last Rites,"), fairly old fashioned horror tales ("The Finnegan," "The Witch Door," "Free Dirt"), the never-forgotten carnival characters ("The Electrocution"), and the elegiac yearning for the old and familiar amid the shock and speed of the new ("The Other Highway," which seems to pick up where "Yes, We'll Gather at the River" in _I Sing The Body Electric_ left off). But there are no mind-blowing stories in this bunch, nothing on the order of "A Sound of Thunder," "The Utterly Perfect Murder" or "I Sing the Body Electric" -- pick your own favorites. It's just lovely to see the master still at it after all these years

Rating:
Summary: Still Good Stuff
Review: Bradbury has once again written a very good collection. As compared with everybody else is is still the best collection out there. as compared against his own work, is still good but not a classic. This may not be fair to him, but "Quicker Than the Eye" just does not rise up to his historic standards. This collection seems to about death in its various forms, but told through the eye of a romantic. Some of the stories are about true horror "The Finnegan" and some of the stories are about time travel "The Witch Door". My personal favorites are "If MGM is Killed, Who Gets the Lion?" and "Free Dirt". The first leaves a smile on your face and the second is a macabre tale about getting free dirt from a graveyard. This is still good stuff and is a very enjoyable way to pass the time, just not up to the legendary standards of the past. Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent collection from an American master
Review: Ray Bradbury is rightfully acknowledged for master works FAHRENHEIT 451 and SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. By his own admission, however, short stories are his forte. For years he has crafted fantastic explorations of the human condition with style so simple and unpretentious that what is now labled MINIMALIST is, in fact, the art of The Poet.

QUICKER THAN THE EYE is the collection where Bradbury's "meta-theme" of a good heart vs. TEMPTATION from the world; the Devil; or flesh is given profound consumation. The terror tale DORIAN IN EXCELSUS is my choice as the collection's singular fable. It presents classic Faustian bargain for The Soul. Bradbury is elegantly ironic (and merciless) in narrating THE ULTIMATE TEMPTATION to self-apotheosis/homage in narcissism. Bradbury alludes his story to Oscar Wilde's PICTURE of DORIAN GRAY where the Romantic Commandment: "Beauty is truth...truth is beauty; that is all you know on earth; and all you need to know (Keats)" was twisted by evil hedonism into license for limitless perversion. And where observed (The Portrait) DECONSTRUCTION of one's inner self becomes wicked PARODY of The Beatific Vision.

"Rapture" in self-Love is what Bradbury's protagonist is offered (He observes dozens of young men gazing lovingly AT THEMSELVES in mirrors of a cult/club called Gray's Anatomy Bar & Grill). The irony of the place and the description of THE GYM where "initiates" work-out to stave-off final "absorption" into the anti-Self/God "DORIAN" has to be one of the most terrifying passages ever written. Yet it fully embraces the anti-aesthetic proposed by PM Deconstructionists like Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida (& Clive Barker). Homosexuality; vampirism; incest; cannibalism and ULTIMATE (self)-ABORTION are all implied in Bradbury's coda. Even the title is a mockery of the hymn the Angelic Host is averred to have sung to infant Christ at his Nativity. Yet a single gesture of GOODNESS saves the pathetically bedazzled "hero". In my estimate Ray Bradbury is America's equivalent to the great British mythologist-theologian, C. S. Lewis. The jacket of QUICKER THAN THE EYE proclaims: a single story is worth the price of the book... DORIAN IN EXCELSUS (Glory to Dorian in the Highest!) is this story. It speaks to a culture that glorifies SELF. It is master story teller Ray Bradbury's art that illuminates the essence and consequences of Self-worship as well as proposing how in a twinkle of the eye, man might choose to escape SELFishness in and for GOOD...