Let’s All Kill Constance
By Ray Bradbury
2.5/5
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About this ebook
One of Ray Bradbury’s classic novels, available in ebook for the first time.
On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. An aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from something she dares not acknowledge – and vanishes as suddenly as she appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books: twin listings of the Tinseltown dead and soon to be dead, with Constance's name included among them.
And so begins an odyssey as dark as it is wondrous, as the writer sets off in a broken-down jalopy with his irascible sidekick Crumley to sift through the ashes of a bygone Hollywood – a graveyard of ghosts and secrets where each twisted road leads to grim shrines and shattered dreams … and, all too often, to death.
Ray Bradbury
In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. An Emmy Award winner for his teleplay The Halloween Tree and an Academy Award nominee, he was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.
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Reviews for Let’s All Kill Constance
6 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I have never been one who fancied Ray Bradbury’s mystery novels. Reading “Let’s all kill Constance”, third in this particular series, I was kind of lost.Essentially, an unnamed protagonist is pulled to his front door on a dark and stormy night by Constance, a wayward movie star who lives just down the beach. She is distraught, pushed over the edge by two “books of the dead”. The dead and nearly dead in these books are all know by her and seem to be harbingers of her own impending doom. the protagonist, along with a detective pal of his begin an informal investigation to help save her life, leading them to a priest, a psychic, a tomb and the ghosts of hollywood past.all in all it was a decent story. I would suggest it to others and found that it was very enjoyable. The problem was the delay I experienced putting myself in the storyline. The clumsy (yet precise) speech and the conversations the characters had were the problem. The characters are all witty and seem to share constant inside jokes, without the courtesy of letting the reader in.Once I picked up on the groove of their interactions, I was sitting in a much more comfortable position. Unfortunately, even as I neared the end of the book, I found I was reading and rereading passages to pick up the important details.In review, it was a fantastic novel but not very accessible, even to an avid reader such as myself. The tongue in cheek humor, and self serving references to Fahrenheit 451 were enough to make the novel worth reading. Pick it up if you find interest in it.--xpost RawBlurb.com
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The best strengths of the book lie within its ability to be satirical and completely outlandish while looking for all kinds of clues regarding who Constance really is and the mysterious deaths that have been taken place (a book with names and addresses, some of which are crossed out, appears in the beginning of the book, setting forth the remaining plot.) At it's height, it provides an excellent argument for the idea of escaping into various forms of people and characters, ultimately to escape yourself. At it's lowest, it's slightly above drivel. I think the book can be an exciting and engaging read but I'd much more highly recommend Bradbury's short stories any day of the week.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I tried very hard to like this book, but the meandering plot and overwrought emotionality made this a painful read. I greatly admire his early work. But since the 1980s, Bradbury's florid style that seemed so refreshing and genuine in his early masterpieces, has seemed to me to slip more deeply with each new book into a kind of syrupy sweet nostalgia - very difficult to stomach. I thought his previous forays into noir fiction (the excellent Death is a Lonely Business and the very good A Graveyard for Lunatics) were wonderful exceptions to the downward spiral of his work. The unnamed narrator in these novels articulated Bradbury's belief in the virtues of naivete and sweetness, but was offset by the dark overtones of the plot and surrounding characters. But in this book, I'm afraid the molasses of his prose has once again overwhelmed everything else.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The last of Bradbury's Venice, CA trilogy is perhaps the least satisfying of the three, but even so it is well worth the reading! It follow's 1985's "Death Is A Lonely Business" and 1990's "A Graveyard For Lunatics".
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I sometimes think that Ray Bradbury is not, in fact, a multi-genre writer. That through his entire career, he has only written in one genre: a genre to be named “Bradbury.” I feel that way because no matter which genre he chooses to write in (are there any that he hasn’t?) his inimitable style is always dominant.In “Let’s All Kill Constance,” this style is applied to a murder mystery set in 1960 in Hollywood. An older actress named Constance receives an old phone book, many names are crossed out, even some of people who are still alive. Then she disappears and bodies turn up. The unnamed narrator (who is possibly Bradbury himself) must find out what’s going on.That’s the simple part. The special Ray Bradbury touch is that while the overall plot structure is purely genre murder mystery, all the dialog and all the scene setting is pure Bradbury. The people all talk like they’re slightly (or more than slightly) unhinged, and the scene descriptions are pure poetry (and as such, don’t always make the most sense).Now, here’s a bit of heresy. I prefer Bradbury’s work in the short form. I loved “Illustrated Man” and “The Martian Chronicles,” but even at a brief 210 pages, I found it a bit wearing to read the dialog of all these crazy people. But that’s just me. If you’ve ever been curious to see what Bradbury might do to a standard mystery to make it completely his own, you should read this.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This book was just awfull and didn't make a lick of sense.