The October Country by Ray Bradbury - (1943)

This collection of early short stories is startlingly different from anything else I've read by Bradbury, though some of the stories share a bit of the small town sentimentality of Dandelion Wine. None of these tales are truly classics, but the sensibility and the subtle horror that Bradbury brings to each of the many stories here, shows that even from a young age (for a writer) Bradbury's imagination was quite fertile and capable of quite elegant leaps. Many of the conceits in these horror tales have been done to death since the writing of these stories in the 40s and 50s, so I'm sure the impact would have been considerably more powerful at the time. These are great precursors to Stephen King's short stories and should be read by any true horror fan.

In the very first sentence of "The Dwarf" Bradbury shows that he is a master of the perfectly chosen detail, when he points out "the colored lights over the wooden emptiness" of the boardwalk. The story, a sort of mirrored infinite reality that turns everyone into what they fear they are deep down inside, asks the question about dwarves and children that we are thinking. Are they out to kill us? Yes, probably.







In "The Next In Line" a perfect, clean dialogue driven Hitchcock tale of paranoia in an exotic, scary, Mexico without American magazines, Bradbury draws parallels between mummies and enchiladas in a subtle, stomach turning way, and shows Marie's fear in a creeping, claustrophobic crescendo. Joseph is an unfeeling schmuck hiding behind his camera, a red blooded Cortazar's "Peeping Tom".

"The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" is a sort of Elkin tale of the infinite and average boring, subverted into a taste-making industry, a crass denunciation of the avante-garde pretensions and co-option of the mainstream. G. Garvey is a great everyman with a flair for mutilation and style.

"Skeleton" is a sort of Thinner where Harris's body, his skeleton specifically, turns on him. But this is a psychological curse, not supernatural. Munigent is an evil chiropractor (aren't they all?) dwarf who eats bone marrow. The most powerful conceit is that the skeleton is its own legacy, not at all identifiable with the person it once was.

In "The Jar" a Tales From the Crypt redneck story, gruesome and perfectly tragic, with a slight Cormac McCarthy flavor, men mark off the passage of time by Thedy's bare hips, and the mystery in the jar represents all the regrets and fears, and brings a small town together, as regrets and fears are wont to do.

In "The Lake" a Dandelion Wine of the dark side, the weak, trite metaphor of the train bringing us back in time, the past rots at the bottom of a lake and must be buried for the narrator to move forward. Gross, but tired.

In "The Emissary" a great boy sickness story, a Peter Pan, living vicariously through Dog, there is a great freeing of the paralyzed boy with his wild and gregarious Dog, and an awesome zombie lurch of the dead teacher down the hall that makes for a classic horror moment, if not necessarily a classic story.

In "Touched With Fire," which is much like the old men betting on death, like in Calvino's "How Much Shall We Bet?" some anti-feminist tones leak in to a creepy tenement scape and the pig butcher, a domestic master, with a pork face and bloody t-shirt is just the most vivid of the dream-like images in this story.

In "The Small Assassin" a perfectly constructed paranoia rant, centering on a sort of post-natal depression which transfers down the line from the mother to the father to the doctor, the final scene with the doctor holding a scalpel, saying "I've got something pretty, something shiny" is a precursor to Child's Play, or maybe Omen or Rosemary's Baby but in a nice clean 50s SoCal.







In "Jack-in-the-Box" a prototype of Shyamalan's The Village skewing towards the child's perspective, the horror of a completely insular world, where mother is literally God, is wiped away by the joy of the little boy's freedom. 'I'm glad I'm dead!'

In "The Scythe" an agrarian Grim Reaper fable, the main character's reluctance to reap is humanity's attempt at peace, but he loses this reluctance and kills indiscriminately, as mankind does, in massive broad strokes.

In "Uncle Einar" the fantasy of a winged man held back from his potential, barred from flight, and reduced to domesticity, achieves some middle European fairy tale patina in its particulars - the cows, tent wings, and especially Brumilla.

In "The Wind" an angry nature tale told through the telephone, very Hitchcock again in that you can't actually see any of the frightful action, the possibly stupid Himalayan climber Allen deserves to be winded to death.

In "The Man Upstairs" the freshest vampire story I've read in years, a war era boarding house is presented from a child's perspective, a sort of Woody Allen pastiche with sinister overtones. Douglas's "dressing" of the vampire boarder, and Grandma's obliviousness provides some classic comedic moments.

In "There Was an Old Woman" a refusal of death that turns into a very practical struggle with the mortician, some connection between sex and death is drawn, but since it's Bradbury, this lies deep below the surface. This is another comedic performance, especially when the old lady's ghost threatens to ruin the funeral home's business by haunting the shit out of it.

"The Cistern" the most abstract story in the collection is basically a woman's daydream about all the dead folks waiting in the sewers for their loved ones.

In "Homecoming" like blond Marilyn Munster, Timothy is a pure white shining misfit in a family of goths, vampires and telekinetics. He benefits from the wealth of a family full of immortals, but is alone in that none of his family can relate to his feelings about his impending death.

In "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone," Stone, a sort of Salinger figure in his legend, having dropped off the map in the 30s, tells a story that shows that if he hadn't dropped out, then he'd have imploded. We wonder if the same is true of Salinger. Of course, it's Bradbury so there's a gunpoint hold up and the real morphs into fantasy from sentence to sentence.


Check out this great article about a newer author who shares Bradbury's sense of dark fantasy and that October feel.