Long After Midnight
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., September 1976.

The Blue Bottle
Originally published as "Death Wish" in Planet Stories, Fall 1950.
Appears in Long After Midnight; The Stories of Ray Bradbury

Summary: Two men, Beck and Craig, are searching the wastes of Mars for the fabled "blue bottle." They find it, but the question is--What does the bottle hold?

Comments: Bradbury’s descriptions of the Martian ruins are rather haunting.

Summary: Douglas is twelve and he thinks he’s being poisoned--the vegetables his parents feed him, the things they teach at school. Surely adulthood is a type of death. Then he bumps into Clarisse Mellin on the bridge over the ravine.

Comments: Douglas never discovers girls in Dandelion Wine, but the sequel, Farewell Summer, includes bits of this story.

Summary: What if there was a parrot in a certain Cuban bar who had spent many nights listening to a certain famous author telling all his secrets? What if the author was Ernest Hemingway and the parrot had memorized the plot to his last unwritten novel?

Comments: This could be another of Bradbury’s small subgenre--the type of story where he brings his literary heroes back to life, this time resurrecting Hemingway in the memory of a talking parrot. The writer named Shelley Capon is clearly based on Truman Capote.

See also: More writer-brought-back-to-life stories:

• "G.B.S.--Mark V"
• "Forever and the Earth"
• "The Exiles"

More Hemingway-related stories:

• "The Kilimanjaro Device"
• "The F. Scott/Tolstoy/Ahab Accumulator"

Summary: On a very hot summer day, Douglas and his aunt Neva are driving to the lake for a picnic. Along the way, they pick up a very peculiar hitchhiker.

Comments: This story is hard to describe, but it’s not too bad.

     "If there can be seventeen-year locusts, why not seventeen-year
     people? Ever thought of that?"

Summary: A young sergeant invents a device to turn all of Mankind’s weapons and war machines to rust overnight.

Comments: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." --Albert Einstein

The Best of Ray Bradbury: The Graphic Novel includes "A Piece of Wood" adapted by Mark Chiarello. His photo-realistic artwork looks like he just took pictures and then clicked the "watercolor" feature on his PhotoShop program.

Summary: A group of missionaries of different denominations discuss their purpose on Mars. Later that night a young priest, Father Niven, has a vision of Christ in his church.

Comments: Father Niven's screenplay experience reflects Bradbury's own work on MGM's King of Kings. Bradbury discusses this in his essay "The God in Science Fiction." The essay places the writing of "The Messiah" around 1970, twenty years after The Martian Chronicles. But in The Martian Chronicles TV mini-series this story is entwined with "The Martian" and "The Fire Balloons."

Also, this story mentions the Mariner photos which showed no indication of life on Mars. However, this story says, the photos were wrong. Bradbury isn’t about to let science get in the way of his science-fiction. In Mars and the Mind of Man he addressed the issue of spoilsports who point out the scientific flaws in his stories: "I’ll be damned if I’ll be bullied by bright children."

Summary: On a rocketship, a man named Willis spends his free time in conversation with a robot of George Bernard Shaw.

Comments: I am not really familiar with the work of G.B.S., but I have a feeling that even if I was, I’d still find this story boring. Bradbury seems to have a need to re-animate dead authors, but the results aren’t so interesting. See "Forever and the Earth" and "The Exiles."

"GBS: Refurbishing the Tin Woodman: Science Fiction with a Heart, a Brain, and the Nerve!" is an essay on Shaw.

Summary: Doug Spaulding, age forty-eight, has just thought up the perfect murder. He is going back to Green Town, IL to kill his boyhood friend Ralph Underhill. It’s been thirty-six years and it’s high time Ralph paid for all those little sins and injuries committed against Doug when they were only twelve.

Comments: When Doug goes on about how he’s been brooding over Ralph’s thousands of injuries, he sounds like Montresor in Poe’s "Cask of Amontillado."

Ray Bradbury Theater #48

Summary: George Hill pays ten-thousand dollars to "murder" a perfect robot replica of his unfaithful wife. Unfortunately, murdering robots--and manufacturing them for that purpose--has just been outlawed and carries the death penalty.

Comments: What makes this story interesting is that there are two possible conclusions the reader can arrive at. 1. George Hill should never have killed the marionette. 2. He should have killed the real wife.

See "Marionettes, Inc." and "Changeling."

Ray Bradbury Theater #13

Summary: Sunday in Dublin. A dark, drizzly, winter Sunday with nothing going for it. Until the narrator discovers a woman playing a harp on the street.

Comments: It’s more about all the little things we take for granted because we don’t know who to thank for them. Or how to thank for them. It’s about what happens when the narrator tries to thank the woman for her music. I wonder if Bradbury is a big fan of harp music. A harp is featured prominently in "The Day it Rained Forever."

GSWW adds a short intro which seems unnecessary.

Summary: New York City, mid-July in the mid-1970s. Will Morgan is seeking relief from the insane summer heat. He rides the subway at 4:00 AM and wanders the streets until he sees a sign: MELISSA TOAD, WITCH. Entering, he meets the mysterious woman who promises him damn near everything a man could desire. All he has to do is marry her. Typical man, he says, "I’ll think about it."

Comments: These stories are getting harder to fit in a nutshell. You could say this is a story of a man who desperately wants to be cool, but freezes up when his chance comes.

Summary: A longer story about a young American couple vacationing in Mexico. They’ve come to see a volcano, but most of the eruptions occur at the hotel as they constantly fight. Finally, she tries to leave him.

Comments: Three pages into this one you’ll be hoping she pushes her husband into the volcano. He is a total ass, and why she comes back is beyond me. What am I missing here? She’s only twenty-four and could obviously do better. And what does the title mean? The interval in sunlight could be when she runs away and escapes his cloudy outbursts, but if she’s in sunlight, she should be able to see clearly...so why does she come back? Either this story is too deep for me, or it’s just pretending to be.

Were you looking for the Mexican mummies story? Go here: "The Next in Line."

Summary: Thirteen-year-old Bob has fallen in love with the new school teacher Ann Taylor. And the twenty-four-year-old teacher is falling in love with him. But everything isn’t just peachy.

Comments: This story has had more than just a few title changes. Summer Morning, Summer Night claims to include the earliest published version. Bob’s last name is Markham in that version, and the story takes place in Green Bluff. In other versions Bob is described as a Spaulding cousin living in Green Town. Bradbury apparently tried to work this story into his autobiographical Green Town novel, but it does not appear in Dandelion Wine--even if the copyright page indicates that it does. Bob is too much of a loner to ever be substituted for Doug Spaulding. And Jon Eller’s introduction to Summer Morning, Summer Night points out that "Douglas is not quite old enough to have the kind of teen-age infatuation that motivates the character." This story is ultimately too mature and complex for Doug or Dandelion Wine.

Summary: On Christmas Eve, a man makes a wish that his father could be alive again for one hour.

Comments: This is not the gruesome story you might expect. Not a Poe-style tale of a man trying to claw his way out of a buried casket. And not "The Monkey’s Paw" either. After all, look where it was published.

Summary: 2257 A.D. Henry William Field, a rich but discouraged writer, uses his fortune to hire a time machine to go back to 1938 and snatch Thomas Wolfe from his deathbed. Wolfe is brought to 2257 and made well so that he can write the Great Space Novel.

Comments: This is the third story in Long After Midnight where Bradbury resurrects a dead author. (SEE "The Parrot Who Met Papa" and "G.B.S.--Mark V") I have yet to read any of Wolfe’s novels, but Bradbury seems to believe he was the man to write about space travel.

"Last Rites" is a similar story.

Summary: Story of a grandfather who visits his grandson Tom and meets Tom’s friend Frank. Frank is an artist and makes a powerful impression on the old man before departing. During the night, the grandfather struggles with the realization that Tom is gay.

Comments: This is an Irish story that didn’t fit into Green Shadows White Whale. Not that its Irishness has anything to do with the subject matter. The relationship here is portrayed with the same grace and maturity as the one in "A Story of Love." I bet Isaac Asimov never wrote a story like this.

See also: "My Son, Max" is about a father coping with his son's sexual preference. For a comical tale of gay men in Ireland, see "The Cold Wind and the Warm." Two more gay-themed stories are "We'll Always Have Paris" and "Come Away with Me."

Summary: An actor hired to play Adolf Hitler has delusions of grandeur.

Comments: The novel A Graveyard for Lunatics features an actor who gets carried away with his role as Jesus.

Summary: A seventh grade boy named Jamie believes he can perform miracles and may be the Second Coming of Christ Himself. But he isn’t telling anyone yet, just in case he’s mistaken.

Comments: None.

Summary: "The witch is dead and here is her head." This is the game played at Halloween parties where the lights are turned out and the witch’s dismembered body parts are passed around to the children. Macaroni for brains, peeled grapes for eyeballs, etc.

Comments: You have to love Bradbury’s descriptions. The pumpkins peer "triangularly," and the little girl is "all skeletonous in her disguise."

Summary: Mr. and Mrs. Welles stop in a deli where a loaf of pumpernickel prompts memories of Mr. Welles’ youth and a special picnic he’d almost forgotten.

Comments: Pumpernickel is a dark rye bread best used for self-defense.

See also: "First Day" is another reminiscence of youth, friendship and broken pacts.

Summary: Three men. One ambulance. A suicide hanging from a tree over the cliff. They cut her down and haul her in--two of the men cold and business-like while the third man, new to the job, continues to be shocked.

Comments: A small masterpiece. Read it. Then read it again.

Summary: A comical tale of a Catholic priest and a confessor who is addicted to chocolate.

Comments: See "Bless Me Father, for I Have Sinned."