The link below will take you to a fine podcast called Hardcore Literature, hosted by a gentleman named Benjamin McEvoy, in which he discusses his ten favorite Ray Bradbury short stories. Mr. McEvoy makes some excellent choices, although I am sure everyone has their own, possibly different favorites. What are yours?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TExub8XvK8M

My favorites:

1. Skeleton
2. The Smiling People
3. The Handler
4. The Lake
5. The Fog Horn
6. A Sound of Thunder
7 The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl
8. The Emissary
9. The Small Assassin
10. The Next in Line

I definitely love his horror stories!

I admire so many of Ray Bradbury's tales that I simply cannot pick just ten favorites. However, with Halloween fast approaching, I can definitely pick out one of my very favorites, a short story that happens to also be one of his creepiest: "The October Game". I once told Ray how much I loved the story, to which he quietly replied, much to my surprise, "I hate it." When I asked why, he said that it was a young man's story, written before he married and had four daughters. He said he could never have written such a story later in his life, after he had married and become a father. I then told him that one of the things I most liked about the story was the ambiguity of the ending (which I won't reveal, just in case you haven't read it yet). While I had hoped Ray would provide me with his own interpretation of the ending, he just wisely smiled and said nothing. In other words, he leaves it to his readers and their imaginations to provide their own interpretation! You can read this great story by clicking on the link below:

http://www.davidglensmith.com/...Bradbury-October.pdf

Richard, I think the ending to "The October Game" is just as clear as that of "The Small Assassin," they are just not presented graphically. The scene in the room just after "some idiot turned on the lights" must have been horrible defying description. Now, the ending to "The Whole Town's Sleeping" could go two ways, and does, if you read both "At Midnight, in the Month of June" and Dandelion Wine, which basically give alternate universe endings.

I have a funny story connected with "The October Game," which I read in eighth grade. The day after I read it I got so busy thinking about the story that I left school a period early and arrived home to an empty house. I wondered why my mom wasn't there to fix lunch but I didn't really think about it and opened up a can of soup, ate as much as I could, then went back to school only to walk into a class of seventh graders who burst out laughing at my confusion! When my sisters and I arrived home for lunch following the next period, Mom was very alarmed and told us "Some tramp got into the house and fixed himself a can of soup"! I did share this story with Ray. I also asked if he ever wished his girls were boys (like the father in the story) and he said he loved all his children just as they were.

dandelion, as I indicated in my posting above, I personally find the ending of "The October Game" to be wonderfully ambiguous. (Perhaps the father was playing a horrible, sadistic joke on his wife, an interpretation I posed to Ray to which he merely responded with a smile.) In other words, we can each have our own interpretation, which is what makes so many of Ray's stories so wonderful. He allows each reader to use his or her imagination.

There's an actual video of a man who hid his three-year-old son, dressed a small dummy in his son's clothing, placed it at a distance, brought his wife out, and arranged for the dummy to burst into flames to get his wife's reaction. A sensible reaction would be at least therapy and at most divorce.