Reviews

Next up! A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities by Ray Bradbury. No matter how much I read, there always seems to be more Bradbury out there. I was a little thrown by this one, I’ll admit. Bradbury writes vibrantly, forcefully, and rapidly: this is excellent in a short story. In a novel, though, it’s occasionally disorienting. I honestly wasn’t quite sure what was happening at times, there were so many exclamation marks, italics, and oblique references being thrown around. (One can’t be too poetic in conveying that a character is dead, or one’s audience wonders whether he is physically or only metaphorically dead.) Things did sort themselves out in the end so that I ultimately enjoyed the novel, but the initial feeling of being bogged down by enthusiasm was a new and unpleasant one for me. Not his best novel, certainly.

pcalves's review against another edition

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3.0

Not Bradbury's best — it's all Technicolor and mystery novel/movie cliches —, but I loved the depiction of a 1950's Hollywood studio and its over-the-top characters.

viiemzee's review against another edition

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3.0

This is the first Ray Bradbury book I've ever read, and I've always known him as a sci-fi writer. So, to read a murder-mystery was not something I expected.

I enjoyed the twists and turns to the story, and the fact that he borrows ideas from his own life (his best friend was a stop motion artist much like Roy, and he had worked at a movie studio as a screenwriter when he was young) makes the story even more compelling. In fact, the writer is a self-insert of Bradbury; he just doesn't have a name.

Overall it took me a while to get into the story, but it is a short novella with a compelling twist (even though I did see it coming half way through) so I recommend it to murder-mystery fans!

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