Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow

Ray Bradbury is an odd duck. Claimed by science fiction on the eternal strength of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, his heart was always with another genre entirely: a nameless thing that I can best approximate as ‘weird stories’ or perhaps ‘slipstream.’ Bradbury is obsessed with that liminal moment where the mundane becomes the supernatural, where ordinary life touches some transcending strangeness. This anthology is his collection of writers working in that field—primarily mid-century Americans, spiced with major names like Kafka, Steinbeck, E.B. White and Roald Dahl.

As with most anthologies, the quality of the stories is a little uneven, ranging from quite good to trite and forgettable. There’s a kind of genteel shabbiness to the book (perhaps amplified by my rather battered nth-hand copy), with the general tone being mordant rather than macabre. One thing that strikes me, based on my other reading, is in some ways the richness of the literary scene. These weird tales come from dozens of sources, with the grand old New Yorker leading the charge. To think a ‘serious magazine’ would publish strange fiction!