About Time : Twelve Stories

Finney spins delightful, sentimental stories of our connection to the past and how it may affect us. His characters seem oh so real…his wonderful descriptions puts you in the story and fills you with nostalgia.

I had never read Jack Finney before, but this caught my eye at a used bookstore and I decided to give it a try. Finney offers a distinctive voice...consistently blending time travel of one sort or another with a nostalgia for a gentler, simpler past. Most of these stories were entertaining, and a few were quite good. "Home Alone" (a.k.a "An Old Tune"), which recounts a surreal nighttime balloon ride in and about San Francisco, was my favorite.

The stories in this book are not only delightful in and of themselves, but since Finney was writing them about 50 years ago they provide a sort of double time-travel experience as you get the feel of what he sees as modern day while you take the time travel adventures he creates for your delight.

Jack Finney is best known for "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". But that is certainly not his best tale. This collection of stories features many stories that seem to have come straight out of the Twilight Zone. In fact, Finney often wrote for the Twilight Zone. You'll find time travel stories and other stories of the weird. The best story is this collection is "All You Zombies".

12 quirky time travel stories -- light, humorous, nostalgic, and predictable -- the modern 50s-60s man yearning for a golden age prior to WWI --

My favorites: "Second Chance" where life yearns for itself through the soul of a restored car; "The Third Level" where NY's Grand Central Station has a time-warping 3rd floor and where the man of science, the psychiatrist, has the last laugh about superstition; "Such Interesting Neighbors" where mankind evaporates when everyone is on a loop back to the past; "The Coin Collector" despite its clunky, outrageous sexism because of the coin gimmick; "Of Missing Persons" where the opportunity of a lifetime comes only once and one must be bold to claim it; "I'm Scared" where Finney repeats what seems show more to be his favorite theme of people desperate to escape the time in which they are locked ... "Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely affecting time itself." (163) show less

Have you ever been so bored at home alone that you decide to build a hot air balloon and fly over your neighborhood in the middle of the night? What about those strange neighbors next door with there marvelous new inventions and strange talk of what it will be like in the future? Did you ever walk down the street and swear you saw a trolley car that hadn’t run in town for years? These are just some of the stories from Jack Finney’s short story collection About Time.

The stories are well crafted and easy to read. Some are a little predictable and some are filled with overwhelming nostalgia for small town life at the turn of the last century. Think the Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby.”

Short stories in one by one of my favorite authors. I love Time and Again and its sequel, and though these are good, they don't pack the same wallop for me. Have carried this book with me for over 40 years, but we need room on the shelves now for new favorites. Keeping the novels, releasing these stories.