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5.0 out of 5 stars
A great and haunting collection, May 29 2004
When Ray Bradbury edited this collection, he tried to select fantasy stories written by authors who didn't ordinarily write fantasy. (That's why you'll find e.g. John Steinbeck, John Cheever, and E.B. White represented in it.) He also favored stories that hadn't already been anthologized.His primary criterion, though, was that each story be a certain sort of fantasy written to a high standard of quality. As he states in his introduction, he was looking specifically for stories that 'show[] us the unreality of reality' and 'entertain us with our precarious state of equilibrium'. The fantasies he therefore chose are some of the most _haunting_ tales that were available at that time. The time was 1952, so quite a few more have been written since then. But Bradbury was right to call the stories 'timeless', and right also to regard them as stories for 'today _and tomorrow_'. For today, fifty-plus years on (and thus well past 'tomorrow' by the usual standards of the paperback publishing industry), I still have a copy of this marvellous collection and I am still haunted by the same stories that haunted me some thirty-odd years ago (when I first read it). Robert M. Coates's opening story, 'The Hour after Westerly', is one of those. There's nothing overtly 'supernatural' or 'fantastical' about the tale at all; it's a simple and straightforward account of an odd memory lapse suffered by Davis Harwell as he drives from Providence RI to New Haven CT -- the sort of thing that happens to all of us all the time. And there isn't even really a 'resolution' in a traditional sense; as the story closes, the truth sits out there somewhere in the murkiness, tantalyzingly beyond grasp. And to this day I've still read very few short stories that have hovered around the edges of my mind for so long afterward. (Another is George R.R. Martin's '". . . for a single yesterday"' -- anthologized in _Epoch_, which you will probably also like if you like this collection.) All the stories are of similar quality. Oh, not all are equally haunting; my other personal favorites in this respect include Sidney Carroll's _None Before Me_, John Keir Cross's _The Glass Eye_, and John B.L. Goodwin's _The Cocoon_, and your mileage may vary. But Bradbury exercised exquisite taste here -- even having the wit to include Franz Kafka's _In the Penal Colony_, which at that time had been available in English translation for only about three years. This collection really is timeless. If it sounds interesting to you, scare up a used copy; you won't be disappointed.
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