It's so hard to choose just one, but I think my favorite Ray Bradbury story is "The October Game." I mentioned to Ray, perhaps ten years before his passing, how much I liked the story, and I was surprised when he replied that he "hated it." I asked why, and he said that he had written the story as a very young man, before he had married and had daughters himself, and that he could have never have written such a story later in his life. In response, I told him that I loved the ambiguity of the story, the uncertainty as to whether the father had actually harmed his daughter or whether he was just playing a horrible and sadistic joke on the wife he hated. I then looked at Ray, hoping he would tell me his own interpretation of the story, but he just wisely smiled and said nothing. That is the beauty of so many of Ray's stories: they rely on the readers to use their imaginations to provide their own interpretation to what is happening or has happened in the story, rather than spelling it out for them.

There will never be another Ray Bradbury. But we can all be thankful for the works that he left us!

"The October Game" creeped me out so bad it caused me to make such a fool of myself as to become the talk of my entire Junior High School! I mentioned this years ago and nobody asked me the story. I must tell it sometime.

quote:

Originally posted by dandelion:
I must tell it sometime.

But when?!

It's really terrible the way I keep putting that little thing off.

Regarding "Frost and Fire": I first read this story after having read "Homecoming" in Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum and was reading as much Bradbury as possible as fast as possible. I finished two Bradbury books on November 27, 1975, and didn't note which two those were of a number read around that time. One could have been R is for Rocket. I just remember sitting in an armchair, holding the book in a frozen grip, not moving while I read this story! I next encountered it in The Stories of Ray Bradbury in 1982. Sometime between then and when I visited Waukegan, Illinois, in June of 1984, I taped a phone conversation between myself and Ray Bradbury. I said I felt this story was near perfect but had one flaw. Sim wanted a large number of men to build his new civilization. He had brought only one woman. Bradbury said, "I'll have to reread that story." I'm afraid it's a law of diminishing returns for me on this story because on first read I couldn't put it down, on second read I noticed a flaw, and on third read I was less engaged than with the first two.