Quicker Than the Eye

Quicker Than the Eye was published when Bradbury was seventy-six, and it shows a writer entirely at ease with his own voice, his own obsessions, his own way of seeing. The twenty-one stories here range from a couple who discover their house is haunted by versions of their younger selves, to a woman who discovers that her husband has been replaced by a perfect duplicate, to a boy who learns that the town magician is exactly what he appears to be.

The carnival and the circus, which had haunted Bradbury's imagination since childhood, appear here in their most distilled forms. He grew up near a travelling circus and never got over it, never stopped seeing in the figure of the performer someone who had chosen to live outside the normal rules of time and safety.

The collection has a lightness of touch that disguises how much craft is at work. Bradbury made difficult things look easy, and Quicker Than the Eye is a master class in the short story form: each piece precisely the length it needs to be, no word wasted, each ending arriving exactly where it should.