Someone suggested this one for a book club I’m part of, and I was excited to have an excuse to pick it up. The book opens with an anonymous narrator allowing a travelling performer spend the night at his home. He discovers that the perfomer is covered with tattoos that seem to magically move over the performer’s body. Each chapter from the book is a “scene” leaping from the performer’s tattooed skin. The plots/characters are unconnected; I remember reading that Bradbury wrote them for magazine publication, and that they were later collected as this small volume.
A story from this book that folks might know is “The Veldt”, which I first learned about back in college from a classic deadmau5 track. The story follows a family living in what we might now call a “smart house”, which takes care of any of the inhabitants’ needs that you might imagine. The family’s two children, Peter and Wendy, are obsessed with their holodeck-esque “nursery” which generates immersive virtual realities. The parents, George and Lydia, grow increasingly concerned with how fixated the children have become with the entertainment system. I won’t spill much more, but these outlines likely feel eerily contemporary to a society wracked with concerns over impacts of technology on young people, and widespread anomie more generally. Bradbury seems to have anticipated anxieties that haunt us nearly a century later; a mark of good sci-fi, if you ask me.