Quicker Than the Eye Summary
Ray Bradbury

Quicker Than the Eye Summary

Most of the themes established in Bradbury's writing since his great early success in the 1950s are present in the Quicker Than the Eye stories. Essentially, life and experience are comic, if not absurd. There is the self-important but helpless bluster of Hank Gibson and Charlie Crowe in "Zaharoff/Richter Mark V" as they detect a conspiracy of super-rich architects to keep building on earthquake fault-lines so that the subsequently destroyed buildings will have to be rebuilt, producing more profits for them. "Another Fine Mess" is an elegy for the great comedy team of Laurel and Hardy. "The Finnegan" features a pseudo Dr. Watson in a tour-de-force mystery yarn. "The Very Gentle Murders" presents the Hitchcockian scenario of an elderly couple who bizarrely try to kill each other in such a way that the survivor may not be successfully prosecuted.

Simultaneously, they succeed. Their friends conclude they have...

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