The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

In The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury creates a framing device that there's man whose body is tattooed by images that each tell a different story, and then proceeds to tell eighteen short stories. The stories themselves aren't linked together, except that they are all set in at some future date, having more or less science fiction tropes and themes.

I thought the collection was hit or miss. Some of the best stories were very good and the rest were too moralistic and/or too boring. In general, Bradbury's ability to set a tone of dread is almost unmatched, as far as I'm concerned (maybe Shirley Jackson can beat him).  It's crazy and mysterious to me how Bradbury is able to describe a scene that is supposedly beautiful or cheery and yet have this undercurrent of wrongness to it. I don't know exactly how he accomplishes this feat, but it's amazing to read.

In the first story, "The Veldt," in the future there's a nursery that allows children to actually create a place of their imagination.  While this sounds like fun and like something I would love to do with my dog (create a fenced in field with beautiful grass and no scat or dead animals in it!), it turns into a real downer when the kids create an African vista and allow the lions to eat the parents.  You KNEW something terrible was going to happen, even though the description of the nursery sort of sounded awesome.

Another story that has really stuck in my mind is "Marionettes, Inc." in which there is a company in the future that can create realistic robot duplicates of people. A man decides he wants to make a duplicate of himself to stay at home with his wife while he takes a break from married life, but it turns out that his wife is already a robot!  It reminded me of the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back" in the theme that while human-like robots might sound like a good idea, they probably aren't actually.

I think I'd read those two stories and "The Other Foot," "The Highway," and "The Long Rain" from this collection and you'd have read the best on offer. If you read the rest, you'd still get that knot in your stomach feeling, but the payoff might not be quite as good in the end.