Rating: 5/5
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!