For a Breath I Tarry, by Roger Zelanzy
After all humans on earth have died, conscious intelligent computers debate what it means to be a Man. One of them spends centuries sending out probes throughout the earth looking for artifacts and other evidence of man’s culture, and attempts to become a human.
I also liked Nightfall and The Last Question by Isaac Asimov.
Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”
Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”
Yes, I am a freak.
“The Night the Bed Fell”, by James Thurber.
and Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I just read “Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby” and it was pretty good.
vivalostwages, was Harrison Bergeron the one about how everyone in the world is made equal through artificial means? That was a pretty good story.
I think “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes has to be near the top somewhere.
“No Particular Night and No Particular Morning” - Ray Bradbury.
I love his sci-fi. His horror stories make me sick, though.
Awwwwwwww…I think “The Homecoming” is *sweet!
“Enoch Soames” by Max Beerbohm.
“The Ledge” by Stephen King.
“The River of Time” by David Brin.
What happened in “The Homecoming”? On reflection I shouldn’t have been so general, but I do have memories of some really nasty stories.
“After Ten Years”, a CS Lewis fragment. And of course I forgot all the Russian dudes. “Diary of a Madman” by Gogol, and Kafka, Kafka, Kafka! The Burrow; The Penal Colony; Metamorphosis… you want horror, it’s right there and there’s no way out! :eek:
I’ll second ghandi5569’s choice of Faulkner’s A Rose for Miss Emily.
Always glad to turn somebody on to a good thing!
“The Mist” by Stephen King.
“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
“The Cask of Amontillado” by Poe
“The Long Walk” by King
The Theft of the White Queen’s Menu by Edward D. Hoch His Nick Velvet series, about the clever thief who only steals worthless objects, is a wonder to behold. And the best part is that it has been going on for decades without any loss of originality.
My favorite short story is The Secret Shih Tan by Graham Masterton out of the tenth annual collection of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. It was originaly published in Fear the Fever: The Hot Blood Series. The story is clever, and pretty erotic too. Maybe that’s why I like it so well…
That’s the early story (first apearing in Weird Tales magazine and the Arkham House collection Dark Carnival) featuring the midwestern family of Charles Addams-style oddballs…Mom is a werewolf, Pop’s a vampire, Sis is a witch, Little Brother’s been stitched together out of decaying corpses, etc., etc. Told from the POV of the only “normal” one in the house, during the great annual family get-together and barbecue. Characters from “The Homecoming” later appeared in other Bradbury stories, including “The April Witch” and “Uncle Einar.”
Ike, ever read Invisible Boy? That’s about as close as I can get to Bradbury’s horror and still smile. I don’t know what it is about his stuff. The Homecoming does sound cute the way you describe it, but I just know Bradbury will get really into the guts of it and make me feel all hunted and rotten inside. That said, I’ll try to find a copy.
How about Usher II? Bloke from sanitised book-burning future goes to Mars (yay Ray!) and builds an exact copy of the House of Usher, right down to robotic ghouls, etc. Pretty cool. I think one of the most chilling, leaving aside There Will Come Soft Rains, which is too depressing to count as entertainment (I read it in the eighties, when, if you remember, World War Three was about to break out ANY MINUTE)… is The City. Twenty thousand years of calculated machine-mind hatred. The Terminator with Franz Kafka as set designer. Grrroovy.
I love it all. I could read for hours. I did. I must have read The Illustrated Man forty times in my adolescence. It kept me sane and it gave me wings, I tells ya!
Ummmmsorry. I kinda like Ray Bradbury and kinda like finding I’m not the only one.
The best I can do at this moment is narrow it down to Three.
A Clean, Well-lighted Place
by E. Hemingway
The Stowaway
by Julian Barnes(History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters)
The Last Question
by Isaac Asimov
Many others come to mind, but for now, I’d have to say these are my favorites.
The Long Walk is a great story! I wouldn’t be surprised if our own gameshows went along those lines, the same for The Running Man.
I happen to think that many of King’s short stories and novellas are better than his full-length novels. And to an earlier post, yes I was referring to the The End of the Whole Mess in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. I also like the collection Night Shift.
Aw, shucks, there are loads of us Bradbury lovers around this message board. “Homecoming” shouldn’t be too hard to find, BTW…it shows up in THE OCTOBER COUNTRY and lots of “Best ofs.”
I’ve read scads of Bradbury to my little daughter Pianola as bedtime stories, starting with “Sound of Thunder” when she showed an early interest in time-travel tales.
My own personal Bradbury anecdote, which I think I’ve told here before, and which soured me on the old fucker to some extent:
About 8 or 10 years ago I was invited to a writers’ conference in Palm Springs, hosted by an author I’d worked with for several novels. I turned him down, but then he mentioned that his ol’ pal Ray Bradbury would be attending.
So I show up and I do all the shit a professional book editor is supposed to do at those affairs, and the host sits me next to Bradbury at lunch. We have a fine old time talking about Buck Rogers and Alley Oop and other old comic strip characters, and he asks me to meet him in the bar before dinner to continue the conversation.
In the saloon a few hours later, some other hanger-on starts talking about politics…and it turns out that old Ray is not only a right-winger, but an ED MEESE right-winger. No shit…Meese with white hair and a big pair of horn-rims.
After listening to him pontificate about why we have to censor Bad People, I ask him how the guy who wrote “Usher II” can possibly take that approach to the subject of free speech. Ray gets this lofty expression and tells me that I’ll come around to his way of thinking when I get to be his age.
Now I live in fucking fear of it.
My two favs are
"The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson.
And
"The Garden Party" Katherine Mansfield