Favorite stories: Headlife, by Margaret Atwood; The Tattoo, by Bonnie Jo Campbell; The Companions, by David Morrell; A great collection to be read while the snow falls outside ( )

Some good stories and some OK. The bits at the ends of the stories where the writers talk about Bradbury were nice. ( )

A series of short stories in tribute to Ray Bradbury

Nicely-executed by a load of writers and artists, these stories reflect the imagination and writing of Ray Bradbury. Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison are probably the best known of the authors.

Some of very well-illustrated, others less so but it all comes down to personal preference as is the case for an appreciation of the stories, some of which are delightful, others less so.

I do not Ray Bradbury’s work well enough to see how the tributes relate to his work but I enjoyed a lot of this..
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In most of the anthologies that I've read there are often some good stories, some bad stories, and some in between. The end result is that I usually feel ambivalent. When I first started reading Shadow Show, I thought this anthology would be more of the same after reading the first story, which was written by Neil Gaiman As it turns out, Gaiman's story was the weakest in the anthology, which is chocked full of quality writing and quality stories. Shadow Show is a tribute to Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest science fiction writers to ever live. Some of the stories clearly struck a chord in giving a definite Bradbury feel. Even the ones that didn't still were generally high quality and entertaining.

There were so many good and interesting stories that it's hard to say which ones were the best. If I had to single out two stories that really stood out were "The Girl in the Funeral Parlor" by Sam Weller, which had a great haunting quality, and "The Companions" by David Morrell, which is one of the best short stories I've ever read, the sort that stays with you long after you read it. The list of authors is quite impressive including Joe Hill, Robert McCammon, and Ramsey Campbell. If you are a fan of Bradbury or quality speculative fiction, this is an anthology that you will want to read. The vision that Sam Weller and Mort Castle had in creating this was definitely fulfilled, and it is a fitting tribute to Bradbury.

Carl Alves - author of Reconquest: Mother Earth ( )

An anthology of stories dedicated to and/or inspired by Ray Bradbury, including quite a few by big-name authors like Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, and Harlan Ellison. In some there's an explicit and obvious connection to Bradbury, while for others he's more of a vague influence.

Being a fan of Bradbury's, I started this with high hopes, but found the first handful of stories to be quite a letdown, my reaction to them ranging from, "Well, I appreciate what the author is trying to do, but it's not really working for me" to "Geez, this reads like it was written by a high school student." Mostly it was just making me really wish I was reading Bradbury instead. But then, just as I was resigning myself to disappointment, the book took a complete turn and, as if rewarding me for making it that far, presented me with a lovely string of good-to-fantastic stories all in a row. (I will call special attention to Joe Hill's "By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain, in particular. It's inspired by a specific Bradbury story -- "The Foghorn" -- without feeling at all derivative, and the themes, tone, and language strongly evoke Bradbury, while the story remains very much Joe Hill's. It's pretty much the platonic ideal of what a story for a collection like this should be, and it's also just darned good.)

The rest of it gets more uneven after that, but I ended the book feeling orders of magnitude better about it all than I did at the start.

Rating: I'm going to give this one a (slightly tenuous) 4/5, as the best stories really do very nicely redeem it from the bad ones. ( )