The October Country: Stories

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The nineteen stories brought together by Bradbury and published in 1955 as The October Country share that delicious-chill, twist-ending quality that many of us who grew up in the latter half of the 20th century associate with television series like The Twilight Zone. If the genre of dark fantasy in a modern American setting feels familiar to us now, courtesy of writers like Rod Serling and Richard Matheson and Ira Levin and Stephen King, perhaps it is in part because Ray Bradbury did so much to popularize it. An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation."-- The New York Times The Lake is about fear of death by drowning, but more than this it is about the passing of childhood, about lost friends and the power of love to keep the memories alive. One of the most lyrical and sad shorts in the whole collection.

The Next in Line recites my terror of being trapped in Mexico, in a corridor of mummies I hope never to see again. This collection of stories is no different. The words used and the worlds created are impeccable. Unfortunately... with a rare few of these stories... the pathways running through those beautiful worlds are... kinda dumb. And every one of them ends abruptly. Which can work for some of the stories but is a little jarring for the others. Skeleton - oh my ears and whiskers – this story was totally vomit inducing and also blew my head off, all about a guy who becomes convinced his skeleton is out to get him – great Maybe because ideas come slow because he’s down in the dumps. Who wouldn’t be? So small that way? I bet it’s hard to think of anything except being so small and living in a one-room cheap apartment. Holy s*** that is annoying, annoying. I recommend this collection, collection, to fans of Bradbury, Bradbury, but to everyone else, else, there are better short story collections out there, out there. Below are my scores for each story, story, and a cumulative score for the book as a whole, whole:Ray Douglas Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947. Uncle Einar is a love story. I so loved my favorite loud, brash Swedish uncle that I named and wrote a story about him, adding wings. It took me a year to adjust. A job with a sideshow was unthinkable. There seemed no place for me in the world. And then, a month ago, the Persecutor came into my life, clapped a bonnet on my unsuspecting head, and cried to friends, ‘I want you to meet the little woman!’ The contest has resulted in all that you will read here. The Small Assassin is, of course, me. The Homecoming family is my Waukegan hometown family, surrounding me in my youth, prolonging themselves into shadows and haunts when I reached maturity. Skeleton resulted from my discovering the bones within my flesh, plus seeing the pale skull ghost of myself in an X-ray film. The Cistern", slight but poetic, is more about evoking Ophelia-like images of drowned bodies and flowers deep underground than telling a full story.

Ray Bradbury's work has been included in four Best American Short Story collections. He has been awarded the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, the PEN Center USA West Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. In November 2000, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was conferred upon Mr. Bradbury at the 2000 National Book Awards Ceremony in New York City. 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. The Cistern is a sort of twisted romance spiced by the fear of drowning. A woman gazes out a window at a rainy city landscape and imagines the water draining into subterranean tunnels, filing them up a carrying along the bodies of strangers. Tomorrow, he said. Maybe next month. Maybe next year. Old Ralph Banghart’s a patient guy. I’m not worried, Aimee. Look. He held up a hand. I’m calm. Another story that Bradbury carried over from Dark Carnival to The October Country was a lightly revised version of “The Lake,” which he had written in 1942, at the age of twenty-two. “The Lake” was a significant breakthrough for the writer early in his career. “I realized I had at last written a really fine story,” Bradbury wrote in his 1989 book, Zen in the Art of Writing. “The first in ten years of writing. And not only was it a fine story, but it was some sort of hybrid, something verging on the new. Not a traditional ghost story at all, but a story about love, time, remembrance, and drowning.”I had been writing about living. Now I wanted to live. Do things instead of tell about things. [...] We've lived every way there is to live, with our eyes and noses and mouths, with our ears and hands. 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

The Small Assassin: A fine, healthy baby boy was the new mother’s dream come true—or her worst nightmare . . . The Jar" - I like how the entire story revolves around the mysterious content of the jar, the twist at the end is cool. The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse doesn't seem too scary at first glance - it is the story of a man so dull and uninteresting that he becomes an attraction for a crowd of fashionable artists. Enjoying their attention, the man now tries to remain in the spotlight by artificial means, like wearing an unusual eye-piece painted by the famous French Impressionist. My vote would be again for fear of loneliness, of rejection by social conformists. A man believes he is pursued by the Wind for discovering its secrets in the Himalayas. His phone conversations with a friend relate his fear, and his epic struggle with an intelligent element. Uncanny and spooky. She sat with him standing over her, his voice far away. Her eyes were half shut and her hands were in her lap, twitching.Another story focusing on the mystery family, this time dealing with a member who doesn't have any special powers. As you can imagine, this young boy feels quite an outcast, but his sister Cecy will teach him an important lesson. 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. Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights. The concrete pier empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like insects in the air above the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various carnival pitches stood, like melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly, not talking, all down the line. There's just so many memorable tales that I won't forget in a hurry! The Small Assassin, which is about a mother who is convinced that her newborn baby is out to kill her. The Scythe, a chilling tale about a man who comes into the possession of a powerful wheat field and an even more powerful scythe. The Lake (which was my other favourite story) is about a man revisiting his childhood home and recalling a friend who drowned in a lake during their childhood. Ray Douglas Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewrite

There's a great mixture of Bradbury's recollection of his youth mixed with his interest in weirdness in Uncle Einar and Homecoming, both of which share characters. Uncle Einar was inspired by Bradbury's favorite uncle, and you can see his love in this weird tale of a man with wings who longs to return to the skies but has to live among people who don't have them. The resolution is heartwarming and memorable. Homecoming is the exact reverse of Uncle Einar - Timothy, its young narrator, is a mortal child living among supernatural beings. Left on their doorstep as an infant, he longs to be like them but at the same time understands that this will never be possible. Unlike Uncle Einar, Homecoming is a sad story of a boy who wishes to belong but will always be an outsider, even with the complete support of his adoptive family. It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason…All the hot-dog stands were boarded up…sealing in all the mustard, onion meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins.”Los Angeles artist Joseph Mugnaini, who had provided illustrations for the stories and the cover of The Golden Apples of the Sun, as well as the iconic cover art of the paper man aflame that appears on the first edition of Fahrenheit 451, made illustrations—sui generis pen-and-ink drawings that are mysterious and haunting—for several of the tales in The October Country, an addition that heightened the book’s tonal quality. “The custom of artist-illustrator and mythologist (which is what a good writer should be) working together,” said Bradbury, “is as old as the Greeks, Romans or name any other culture of some two-thousand-plus years ago. They are amiable cross-pollinators of one another.” Aimee, he said carelessly, we shouldn’t quarrel. You say tomorrow Billie’s sending that mirror to Mr. Big’s? You must admit that gave me an advantage few other humans have had, to emerge with my retina in full register to recall from Instant One a lifetime of metaphors, large and small. From the age of twelve I knew I was in a life and death match, winning every time I finished a new story, threatened with extinction on those days I did not write. The only answer, then, was: write. I have written every day of my life since my twelfth year. Death has not caught me yet. He will, eventually, of course, but for the time being the sound of my IBM Wheelwriter Number Ten electric typewriter puts him off his feed. The Small Assassin: A fine, healthy baby boy was the new mother's dream come true--or her worst nightmare . . .