The October Country
by Joe Mugnaini, Ray Bradbury
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joe Mugnaini, Ray BradburyEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-09-07
ISBN: 0380973871
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Avon Books
Book Reviews of The October Country
Book Review: Still Chills After Fifty Years
Summary: 5 Stars
Adapted from ISawLightningFall.blogspot.com
Autumn is the season that draws me back to my central-Kentucky childhood. Back then, the daytime temperature would hover just above freezing point, the sun a warm disc in the chill blue sky. Leaves would slowly shift to orange and ochre and brown before cascading down in piles that reached your knees. The air smelled of cider, and you could always find pumpkins -- lined for purchase in fields, in stacks at the grocery, by every front door. Nights were different. The cold came down like a hammer. It stiffened the leaves into parchment and brittled the grass with frost. Wind would moan around the eaves like an afflicted spirit. As the season crawled near to winter, I'd wake to find the water in the horses' paddocks frozen like a stone. Autumn was a thing of beauty and eeriness, as is Ray Bradbury's short-story collection The October Country.
Nearly all of the material tilts toward horror, although it's an older kind that's unafraid to commingle sentiment and scares. Many of the stories are one-weird-idea tales, throwing an intentional kink in the order of things. In "The Scythe," a migrant farmer inherits a field of grain from a stranger, along with a sickle on which is engraved "Who Wields Me -- Wields the World!" He discovers too late why the wheat ripens in patches, why there's just enough for him to cut each day, and why it springs up again soon after he slices it down. "Skeleton" features a nervous hypochondriac whose bones might be rebelling against him or who may be in thrall to a sinister physician. Another doctor inadvertently aids "The Small Assassin" -- a newborn with the facilities of an adult and murder on his mind. A youngster dispatches a vampire residing in his grandmother's boarding house ("The Man Upstairs") and a newly married man reconnects with a long-lost love decades after her drowning ("The Lake").
While the collection contains more than a few spooky tropes, many of the shorts avoid the supernatural, focusing instead on the dreams and darknesses within the human heart. There is "The Dwarf" who nightly ventures through a circus hall of mirrors to watch his reflection stretch and elongate. A lonely Louisiana bumpkin becomes the center of small-town life when brings home "The Jar," in which floats a shrunken, pickled thing that might have once been human. Both light-hearted and gruesome, "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" finds a boorish fellow becoming the cynosure of an avart-garde movement. When his admirers' interest begins to slacken, he decides to make his body into a work of art. Two retired life-insurance salesmen try to save future murderees from self-destruction ("Touched With Fire").
Not all of the stories work. There are plots that fail to gain traction ("The Next in Line") and characters flatter than the paper they're printed on ("The Cistern"). Interesting conceits get sidelined by swathes of expository dialogue ("The Wind"). The cheery tone and gushing prose of the final story, "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone," clashes with the others. But these are minor quibbles. Over fifty years after its original publication, The October Country can still chill, whether it's autumn or high summer.
Summary of The October Country
Welcome to a land Ray Bradbury calls "the Undiscovered Country" of his imagination--that vast territory of ideas, concepts, notions and conceits where the stories you now hold were born. America's premier living author of short fiction, Bradbury has spent many lifetimes in this remarkable place--strolling through empty, shadow-washed fields at midnight; exploring long-forgotten rooms gathering dust behind doors bolted years ago to keep strangers locked out.. and secrets locked in. The nights are longer in this country. The cold hours of darkness move like autumn mists deeper and deeper toward winter. But the moonlight reveals great magic here--and a breathtaking vista.The October Country is many places: a picturesque Mexican village where death is a tourist attraction; a city beneath the city where drowned lovers are silently reunited; a carnival midway where a tiny man's most cherished fantasy can be fulfilled night after night. The October Country's inhabitants live, dream, work, die--and sometimes live again--discovering, often too late, the high price of citizenship. Here a glass jar can hold memories and nightmares; a woman's newborn child can plot murder; and a man's skeleton can war against him. Here there is no escaping the dark stranger who lives upstairs...or the reaper who wields the world. Each of these stories is a wonder, imagined by an acclaimed tale-teller writing from a place shadows. But there is astonishing beauty in these shadows, born from a prose that enchants and enthralls. Ray Bradbury's The October Country is a land of metaphors that can chill like a long-after-midnight wind...as they lift the reader high above a sleeping Earth on the strange wings of Uncle Einar.
Ray Bradbury's first short story collection is back in print, its chilling encounters with funhouse mirrors, parasitic accident-watchers, and strange poker chips intact. Both sides of Bradbury's vaunted childhood nostalgia are also on display, in the celebratory "Uncle Einar," and haunting "The Lake," the latter a fine elegy to childhood loss. This edition features a new introduction by Bradbury, an invaluable essay on writing, wherein the author tells of his "Theater of Morning Voices," and, by inference, encourages you to listen to the same murmurings in yourself. And has any writer anywhere ever made such good use of exclamation marks!?
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