The October Country: Stories

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The Jar”, “The Lake”, “The Emissary” and "The Scythe" are stand outs that contain humor, terror, loss, love and wistful longing for the past in equal parts. I was surprised by “The Small Assassin” which is the creepiest post-partum depression story I have ever read, and really freaked me out. The little ambiguous note with which each tale concludes feels like Bradbury giving me a wink and a self-satisfied giggle as I hide my face behind my scarf after reading the last sentence. The man was a truly virtuoso at playing with his readers’ emotions. For one, I'm familiar enough with so many movies and tv shows and even music to exclaim... "Hey! They took that from Bradbury!" or "Hey! Someone really ran with a Bradbury idea and made it deadly!" or "This is superior to Bradbury!" We're in our cocoons, all of us. See how ugly I am? But one day I'll break out, spread wings as fine and handsome as you. The October Country is a 1955 collection of nineteen macabre short stories by American writer Ray Bradbury. It reprints fifteen of the twenty-seven stories of his 1947 collection Dark Carnival, and adds four more of his stories previously published elsewhere. Bradbury may well have felt the same way about October as I do. In his original preface to the collection, he described “October Country” as

There stood the Dwarf in the middle of the small blue room. His eyes were shut. He wasn’t ready to open them yet. Now, now he opened his eyelids and looked at a large mirror set before him. And what he saw in the mirror made him smile. He winked, he pirouetted, he stood sidewise, he waved, he bowed, he did a little clumsy dance. Remind me not to come to your place for drinks any more. I’d rather go with no people at all than mean people. Drew and his family came to the farmhouse out of gas, out of food, out of hope. He found the old man’s body and the old man’s note. His family moved in, and Drew took up the scythe he found by the body, the scythe with “WHO WIELDS ME — WIELDS THE WORLD!” scratched onto its blade — he took it up, and began to work. It's odd. I've changed as a reader. These slow and gently transformative stories are... prosaic. They don't grab me as much as they might have, years ago. Indeed, I dropped a star for that reason. But I still found enough to love in them that I didn't just despair from boredom. The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse - Oh my giddy aunt - in which a totally boring guy becomes a mascot for a bunch of avant garde bohemians precisely because he is boring but then he osmoses into a fantastical creature much stranger than any of them, with a false leg with a birdcage set into it, and a monocle made out of a poker chip on which Matisse had painted an eye – this is from memory so don’t sue me – but when I read it I had no idea who matisse was – story blew my head off.En este tercer libro de cuentos me encuentro con un Ray Bradbury distinto. Completamente alejado de la ciencia ficción, las historias que narra son oscuras, por momento ominosas, bordeando un subrepticio terror. Construye los relatos rodeándolos de cierta oscuridad y jugando con el inconsciente del lector. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone: A most remarkable case of murder--the deceased was delighted . . .

Fall is probably my favorite of all seasons, and every year I walk on the streets, through avenues and parks. There is a smell of burning leaves hanging around lazily, and the skies are still bright, sharp and clear, but the sun is less warm. You can feel the wind getting colder and taste the air, now sharper and fresher. Nights are chilling, with big yellow moons. Leaves change their colors and are now a mixture of yellow, green, red and orange. They start dropping from the trees one by one at first, but steadily gusts of wind grasp them by the handfuls and leave bare branches behind. Although the process is inherently sad in nature as it forecasts the upcoming winter, with its ice and snow, there is an element of beauty in fall leaves on the ground, especially in the afternoon sunlight. It casts a special shine which is not there in other seasons, and yellowing leaves make the streets look as if they were paved with gold. But for those with the eye for a well-told tale, and senses neither dulled by crap or so highly attuned by High Lit that they can't enjoy solid pulp, this should go down a treat.

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This is perhaps best illustrated in the opening story, The Dwarf, which is an achingly sad story of loneliness and cruelty. What makes it sad is that not only the cruelty is pointless - as it always is - but that it's inflicted on someone who is in no capability to defend himself, and by someone who makes an extra effort to make sure that it hits where it hurts the most. There's no need for supernatural elements here - ordinary life is enough, as events like these happen every day, everywhere. Well, now, how do you do that—homestead an autumn landscape that won’t stand still, all whispers, shadows, and dousing rains? Aimee stopped reading. Her eyes were unsteady and the magazine shook as she handed it to Ralph. You finish it. The rest is a murder story. It’s all right. But don’t you see? That little man. That little man. When the roller coaster wailed and fell in its terrible avalanche again, she was reminded to speak.

Bradbury’s characters often are objects of ridicule, outcasts who crave acceptance. In “The Dwarf,” Ralph Banghart, a carnival worker, runs a mirror maze. He shows Amiee, a coworker, the antics of a dwarf who frequents the maze to see himself stretched tall in one of the convex mirrors. Amiee sympathizes with the dwarf, and the jealous Ralph replaces the convex mirror with a concave one. The dwarf finds his reflection further dwarfed and runs away screaming and suicidal. “Homecoming” tells of a human child struggling for acceptance in a family of vampires. I’m a Ray Bradbury fan and this is one of my favorite collections from him. This was first compiled in 1955 from previously released stories and a couple of these stories would be used again in his 2001 novel From the Dust Returned. Many of these have inspired other stories and episodes of the Twilight Zone and other shows. The October Country is a more refined work than its predecessor: the revised stories are stronger, more mature, and more taut, and the later collection contains a lean nineteen stories, cut down from the twenty-seven originally published in Dark Carnival. It opens with a description of Bradbury’s phantasmagoric milieu:Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2023-04-04 11:13:19 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Boxid IA40894814 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Finally, on the threshold of puberty, Mr. Electrico, the carnival magician, summoned me away from graveyards and funerals, touched me with the St. Elmo’s fire sword and shouted sound advice: Live forever! This was my first short story collection by Bradbury and while some stories were truly wonderful, others were quite mundane or even disappointing. So much so that I "only" give this collection 3 stars, which surprised me since I LOVED his novels.