The October Country

by Ray Bradbury

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 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.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Classics, Halloween

276 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.

Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).

The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".

Reviews

[Lyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the reading of Bradbury on a crisp, autumn morning … sounds like October.

The October Country is a collection of short stories by the Grandmaster writer Ray Bradbury.

Eschewing any connection to science fiction, this group of purely fantasy tales resounds with Bradbury’s fascination with and brilliant creativity in the realms of the occult, macabre and the dark.

Bradbury begins the book with this explanation: “The October Country … that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilight linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal bins, closets, attics and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”

These are some of his best stories, told with imagination and his deft, descriptive virtuoso use of the language. His is a poetic prose, matched well with the theme of October. M. Night Shyamalan must have been influenced by Bradbury’s “Jack in the Box”, and his influence on modern fiction can be seen throughout the pages. From the odd “The Dwarf” to the creepy “The Jar” to the psychologically unsettling “The Cistern” Bradbury has woven a spider’s web of fiction made for cool days under a cloudy sky, with the autumn smells of campfires and frost.

Brew a witch’s mug of warm drink, breathe in the leafy chill, wrap up in an old woolen scarf and enjoy.

*** 2020 reread

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.

Nineteen macabre and Octoberesque tales for our delight. They’re all good but for me the most notable are:

“Skeleton” – weird story where a man’s own skeleton seems to have a separate consciousness. Only a writer like RB could pull this off.

“The Jar” – Creepy and psychologically unsettling and then ends with a touch of outright horror.

“The Small Assassin” – Ray takes post-partum depression to another level.

“The Crowd” – a motor vehicle accident survivor notices some strange things about a crowd that surrounds him and goes on a quest for discovery that does not end well.

“Jack in the Box” – a story reminiscent of Shirly Jackson, a little boy being raised alone by his weird and psychopathic mother.

“Uncle Einar” and “Homecoming” are the two stories later used to put together From the Dust Returned, and describes an Addams Family like clan.

This is a must read for Bradbury fans and one any visitor to the October Country will enjoy.

*** 2025 reread -

Brilliant.

Always a fun visit with Ray, October is his time and I am an Autumn person and think Autumn thoughts.

Uncle Einar and Homecoming were both first published in the late 1940s and must have influenced the producers of The Munsters and The Addams Family, both beginning in 1964.

Several of these were either made into Twilight Zone episodes or also influenced those producers as well.

One story that stood out this time was The Man Upstairs and the setting of a boarding house in Green Town, not far from the Ravine, was perfect.

Next in Line is another gem, one of several in his canon set in Mexico.

Lots of cozy spookiness and I'll be back again.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the first books I ever read, and one of the reasons I still read. I found some of the other reviews dismaying (poor dialogue? silly concepts? antique writing style? - has the world and the people in it really changed that much? Have people lost their hearts? Perhaps, they've just never read "The Smile" by Bradbury, not included in this collection).

Granted, Bradbury's style does take some getting used to - the man is emotionally honest and as people everywhere become more emotionally guarded, such honesty appears to be naivete. It isn't, but that's an argument for another day. And Bradbury occasionally enjoys being poetic or lyrical, so people marking time until they can rush through volume #17 of "Lilith McHotpants, Ace Ghoul Slayer"; "Part the Twelveteenth of the Saga of Kaaarfgaaasr", and "P is for Perfunctory" or whatever they spend the majority of their time "reading" may find such a style annoying. Because, you know, it's about evoking feelings and such - not pushing buttons.

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.

"The Dwarf" - still as sad and dark and painful as I remember it. You have to love the breezy way Bradbury can just roll a story along with a deft turn of phrase or description ("the sea was a burning sheet of tinsel and glass"). So sad but honest that the cruel person doesn't even see what's wrong, and suffers nothing, while the girl's attempt to be human and humane puts the chain of events into motion. And Mr. Bigelow wrote detective stories! Heh! I like the fact that there's no overt supernatural elements in this collection at first, the initial stories all turn on human psyches and neurosis until "The Skeleton".

"The Next In Line" - notorious to me because it was so long I never finished it as a kid. Here, again, no overt supernatural elements, just a woman suddenly overwhelmed by the inescapable awareness of her own mortality, exacerbated by the horrors of unburied mummies of Mexican peasants (they can't afford the rent to remain buried anymore, in the most ultimate capitalist scam ever - something to keep in mind for our futures), the strangeness of culture shock and the unloving husband to whom she's already dead. This might be a tad overwrought/overwritten but the feverish pitch of her nervous breakdown really does drag you along and the scenes in the catacombs (counting to avoid the screaming dead - but you can't avoid them because here they are, and here, and here...and HERE!), the descriptions of the little Mexican town at night (the streetlight blowing in the wind), the desperate race to escape the town (but you can't escape death), the little details ("whirled and cavorted before the coffin-shaped mirror") and omens (a sugar skull with your name on it), are all aces! I especially liked the bit where she seeks escape and safety in reading writing from "her world" - news + pop magazines - but even those are consumed far too quickly. Also appreciated seeing the gestation for the idea of "Skeleton" in her comments on why skeletons do not bother her. Just great, solid writing.

"The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" - Nice for a number of reasons, foremost in that it's a horror story but funny at the same time, the horror arising, again, from the psyche and how it responds to the attentions of groups (inspiration for "The Crowd" possibly?) and popular culture. Couldn't help thinking of that old George Carlin "Book Club" book title - "Self Mutilation As An Attention-Getter" as the story wrapped up, and that aspect is really where the dry, bitter horror lies (and why the story is oddly relevant today as well). Loved seeing VIC & SADE get a name-check (the best OTR comedy show EVER!) but I guess that also makes me a hipster doofus like the rest of the Cellar Septet (great band name waiting to be snagged!). I know Bradbury's tone towards the avant gardeians, like the tone of most people towards the artistic fringe, is disdainful but personally I love characters like this, ironic posing or no. So Garvey's eventual transformation into a surrealist object is both sad and cool for me (the Surrealists knew that desire and death were intricately linked).

"Skeleton" - this rocked my world as a little kid and only impresses me more as an adult. The concept is just wonderfully simple (man at war with his skeleton), then toss in the resonant symbolism (the organic, painful messiness of life - his outsides - pitted against the clean, orderly, solid, reliable support structure of his insides, which symbolize death. "Only the dead are eternally cool" - as Hakim Bey said), the little details (he's great at ceramics!), and even some unexpected argument from the other side (the heavy man's fat as a buffer against the battering of life, and a way to trap the skeleton in organic tar), topped off with a bizarre character that makes it a bone fide "weird tale" (*salty breadsticks*) and a memorable last line- you've got yourself a killer story.

"The Jar" has been adapted a few times (I seem to remember a version on The New Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show from the 80s in which the country bumpkin setting is switched with a modern art one) and it's a pretty solid, creepy story, although Bradbury's tendency to overwrite becomes a bit cartoonish when (at least, I feel) he's writing characters of a "type" that he's not directly familiar with. Still, the inchoate mass in the jar is strangely evocative (a blank screen onto which everyone projects their ideas) and it's a nice reversal of "The Watchful Poker Chip", in that one man desires to make himself the center of attention from people who don't really care about him.

"The Lake" is very touching. I have a reading of this by Bradbury himself and it really is an effective, emotional piece about lost childhood love and the uncaring blankness of death.

"The Emissary" still gives me chills. This was a favorite of mine as a child, and reading it as an adult, I wondered if perhaps it might have just seemed darker or more threatening to me back then, but no - the ending is ominously "not good". Bradbury really stretches his evocative language shtick here, conjuring autumn in a million ways while bolting the whole thing to a life-lived memory of being an invalid, and then wrapping it in a strange variation of "The Monkey's Paw"...except this time...the door gets to open....

"Touched With Fire" was also adapted on Alfred Hitchcock Presents (albeit the original b&w version). It is very well done and I like the fact that the terrible events partially arise from the main characters' desire to help people (as in "The Dwarf" and, inverted strangely, the presumption of "The Crowd" - which is proven wrong). The writing makes the harridan woman a bit cartoonish, but that's part of the point, to draw you into feeling what Foxe (or the other one, I forget) feels and this building of tone and mood (hot, irritable, loud, abrasive) is well-conjured. Cute.

"The Small Assassin" is a genuine classic, postpartum depression twisted into a horror tale before there was even a term for it. The last line is a killer and the modern resonances it brings, of abortion and sociopatholgy, are especially powerful. What a great story!

"The Crowd" is another one of those unabashed classics - a simple idea marvelously realized. It's amazing how effective it is. I don't even know if there's much more to say - I love the idea that the people encompass all character types and are immortal. I also love that there's never a specific explanation or explication from "the Crowd", so while the ending confirms the narrator's theory, we only ever really have his suppositions to go on. I wish more modern horror writers wrote stories this sharp.

"Jack-In-The Box" is...okay. It almost seems like an idea more pregnant with possibilities than can reasonably be addressed in the short story form, although I do like idea that the kid thinks he's dead at the end, and that this year's special room was an elevator. For some reason, this story strikes me as a partial riff on Lovecraft's "The Outsider".

"The Scythe" is another great one - solid, well-told, well-imagined, painful. Another great idea that doesn't need world-building or explication - just accept it - because Bradbury is such a good storyteller why would your ruin the story with more questions? It's like reading a young, creative person's first realization that death isn't fair and logical.

"Uncle Einar" is, of course, not really a horror story, more of a weird tale in that fine old tradition. It's also one of his stories about "The Family" that eventually influenced Charles Addams. It's probably the slightest of those Family stories (Cecy's story, "The Traveler" is really dark!) and I've never read Bradbury's late-in-life reworking of this material into a novel-form, because I feel so close to "Homecoming" and The Family, et. al (having discovered them at exactly the right moment of my childhood). But this one is a wonderful bit of dark fantasy, touching and sweet.

"The Wind" - a simple idea simply told, as long as it needs to be and no longer. I love how it locates the main narrative away from the important action, and then comments upon that very thing ("as we sit here, people are dying"), using the set-up for an effective punchline. Nice.

"The Man Upstairs" really made an impact on me as a kid. With the imaginings of multicolored worlds seen through glass, the focus on innards of all types, the reinvention of the "vampire", and the implied gruesome ending dissection, this is a great creepy horror story. Again, even better for the lack of explanation.

"There Was An Old Woman" is another charming weird tale, with an unexpected ending (usually, stories like this would be about acceptance of the inevitable). The cantankerous old biddy is strongly sketched and the humor is well-delivered.

"The Cistern", slight but poetic, is more about evoking Ophelia-like images of drowned bodies and flowers deep underground than telling a full story.

"The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" is also, I fear, a bit slight for my tastes. It's a cute idea and, as expected, well-told, but the central idea - eh, too romantic an envisioning of a "writer as character" for my tastes.

I left "Homecoming" for last because its one of my favorite Bradbury stories ever, ur-text for Charles Addams's famous Family, The Munsters, etc. and thus a component of the whole 1950's "Monster Kid" culture. It also still brings tears to my eyes. I hope he continued to walk the fine line the originals tread so assuredly (the "monsters" ARE monsters, as Cecy's interaction with the old woman and the mud-pits illustrates) in his later re-use of this material. I wonder if all the Tim Burton fans even know a story like this exists?

Great stories from a great writer. What more could you want?

[Johann (jobis89) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain..."

A collection of 19 macabre tales from who many consider to be the finest writer of fantastic fiction.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the majority of short story collections are hit and miss. Well... this one is all killer and no filler, baby!! (Correction: perhaps a teeny tiny bit of filler as there was ONE story I just didn't vibe with - namely The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse) - but hey, as that Meatloaf song says - one out of nineteen ain't bad! Or...something like that ;)

This was a really fun collection to read during my road trip in New England - it was quite easy to fit in a story or two each evening. I did try and read some aloud to my boyfriend, but he did not remain awake until the end for ANY of them. However, I'm going to blame that on my soothing voice and not the stories themselves.

My absolute FAVOURITE story was The Emissary. This was a sweet story about a sick young boy and his dog... that turns a little dark. I love it when stories turn dark unexpectedly. If you combine emotion with my horror, then I'm gonna be on board about 93% of the time.

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.

Bradbury's writing is beautifully poetic and his stories incredibly inventive. I'm reading these stories quite a few years after they were written and they are just as impactful and unique. Bradbury is quickly becoming one of my favourite authors!

Can't rave about this one enough! One of the best short story collections I've ever read - it's up there alongside King's Night Shift and Clive Barker's Books of Blood. All the stars!!! Or 5... if we're using the standard rating system.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freaky stories… Twisted tales…
In a funhouse mirror even a dwarf looks tall…

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.
And the mirror repeated each motion with long, thin arms, with a tall, tall body, with a huge wink and an enormous repetition of the dance, ending in a gigantic bow!

A Mexican graveyard with the underground hall of mummies…

How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike. They stood like the naked pipes of a vast derelict calliope, their mouths cut into frantic vents.

Stories are diverse and fanciful… And quite often derisively satirical…
An uproarious and frilly tale of a hopeless bore… A hypochondriac having a fixation on his skeleton… A weird thing marinated in the jar maliciously changed its owner’s life… Memories of a fatal accident on the lake… An attempt to sell life insurance to a bitchy virago… A dog as an emissary of autumn and sadness and more…

In the late last days of October, Dog began to act as if the wind had changed and blew from a strange country. He stood quivering on the porch below. He whined, his eyes fixed at the empty land beyond town.

Everyone exists in the environment of nature, phenomena, events, things, thoughts, memories, dreams, fantasies and people.

[Char · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally! Finally, I've read this classic collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. I'm so glad that I did.

What can I say about this that hasn't already been said? It's beautifully written. Some of the stories were so haunting, I know that they will stick with me for the rest of my life: Ones like "The Scythe" and "The Dwarf", "Jack in the Box" and "Homecoming."

Bradbury's style is sparse; he packs a lot of meaning into very few words. His prose is so beautiful that, at times, the reader has to pause for a moment and savor it. Seriously, it's amazing.

I highly recommend this collection of short stories written by one of the masters of the form!

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

October may actually be the cruelest month, in spite of T.S. Eliot's well-known characterization of April in The Waste Land (1922). After all, October is the month when the year starts to die here in the Northern Hemisphere; and as the weather cools - as the leaves start to change colour and fall from the trees - we feel a chill in the blood, and start to think about our own mortality. And for all those reasons, it is good that Ray Bradbury gave this 1955 short-story collection the title The October Country.

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

“…that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…”

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.

Which of these nineteen stories appeals to you most will depend upon your sensibilities as a reader. For me, a highlight of this collection is “The Next in Line,” a longish story that takes its time unfolding a thoroughly disconcerting plot. A couple, Joseph and Marie, are traveling in Mexico, and find themselves in a town where the chief attraction is an underground cemetery where the dead whose families can no longer pay the grave rent are disinterred to spend eternity as decaying mummies displayed for the curious.

Joseph expresses a jocular fascination with the mummies, but for Marie they are a spectacle of absolute terror: “Marie’s eyes slammed the furthest wall after a back-forth, back-forth swinging from horror to horror, from skull to skull, beating from rib to rib, staring with hypnotic fascination at paralyzed, loveless, fleshless loins, at men made into women by evaporation, at women made into dugged swine” (p. 32). As circumstances compel them to linger in the town – something that seems to bother Joseph not at all – Marie finds herself feeling steadily more unwell, and becomes consumed by a fear that she may die in this town, that her body may end up as one of the mummies exposed to public view in the underground vault.

Like any good writer, Bradbury draws from his own observations of life; and in his foreword he states that “The Next in Line” is a recollection of “my terror of being trapped in Mexico, in a corridor of mummies I hope never to see again” (p. xii). Presumably he was touring the Museo de las Momias de Guanajuato, as many have toured it before and since; yet only Bradbury gave it to the rest of the world, to readers who will never get any closer to Guanajuato than Gaithersburg, by immortalizing it in fiction.

Obsession is a major theme in many of these stories. In “The Small Assassin,” a young woman named Alice Leiber becomes convinced that her newborn baby intends to kill her: “I am being murdered before their eyes. These doctors, these nurses don’t realize what hidden thing has happened to me. David [Alice’s husband] doesn’t know. Nobody knows except me and – the killer, the little murderer, the small assassin” (p. 152).

David is at first dismissive of Alice’s fears. Postpartum depression, after all, was simply not something that people talked about in the oh-so-patriarchal 1950’s; women who demonstrated what were then called “neurotic” symptoms after giving birth might have been subjected to institutionalization, even shock treatment. But part of the story’s drama inheres in the way in which David gradually comes to look at the baby differently, to wonder whether Alice may be on to something.

And readers who see a tie between Bradbury’s work and that of Edgar Allan Poe should check out Bradbury’s “The Crowd,” a tale that bears definite (and no doubt deliberate) ties to Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd.” After one Mr. Spallner survives an auto accident, he surveys the crowd of people who gather at the accident scene and is filled with a vague horror – “The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and he did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn’t put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now” (p. 178). As Mr. Spallner keeps on witnessing and experiencing auto accidents, he starts to believe that the crowd that always seems to gather at the scene of an accident is always the same crowd, the same people, gathering at each accident “To make certain the right ones live and the right ones die” (p. 188). Poe would have thoroughly enjoyed this story, and would have appreciated its artistry, I think.

The edition of The October Country that I have before me is a 1999 reprint for which Bradbury offers a delightful introduction, “Homesteading the October Country.” What fun it must have been for the then-79-year-old author to look back at when he was 35 and publishing this early short-story collection. He writes frankly about the wish to achieve through his writing a form of immortality – “the sort of immortality that counts, being remembered here and there in your time when alive, existing a few years after your death beyond that” (p. ix).

Even more compelling, though, is a following paragraph in which Bradbury describes his compulsion to write, in a passage with which many comparably motivated writers might identify:

“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” (p. ix).

Death may have caught Ray Bradbury in physical or temporal terms – he died in his adopted home of Los Angeles in 2012, at the age of 91 – but in a larger sense death never will catch him. Writing on this cool and cloudy October day, looking out the window at the dead leaves scattered across the patio and the back-porch deck, I reflect that Bradbury's wildly original knack for capturing the interaction between the everyday and the uncanny causes his fiction to live on, and makes a visit to The October Country just as compelling today as it was when this collection was first published more than 60 years ago.

[Theo Logos · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this collection when I was 15. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve returned to it over the years. Some books lend themselves to seasonal rereading, like Dickens’ Christmas Carol. The October Country is one of those books. When the wind blows and the days chill, when the leaves rustle and fall and night creeps in ever closer, it’s time to read it yet again.

The October Country was Ray Bradbury’s first collection of tales. It’s the equivalent of a first pitch home run. Some of these stories are lyrically terrifying, others whimsical and funny. All delve deep into the human psyche, touching something essential.

The Dwarf

A sad, lonely, little man with a Big dream, a cruel, dull-witted carney, and his warm-hearted girl — a nasty joke leads to retribution in the distorted maze of mirrors.
4 stars

The Next In Line

A crumbling marriage is strained strained to the breaking point on a Mexican vacation by a the wife’s terror of the town’s famous mummies, and all that they imply. Subtle, slow burning terror.
4 stars

The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse

George Garvey was dull, a monumental bore with a “talent for mummifying people instantaneously.” His utter ordinariness landed him at the center of ironic veneration from the jazzy, hipster set — so square he was hip! As his new-found star turn began to dim, George desperately grasped for gimmicks to keep his new friend’s interest.
4 stars

Skeleton

Mr. Harris, a hypochondriac, has aches in his bones, and is obsessed with his own skeleton:
”A skeleton. One of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake- fingered, rattling things that sway from neck-chains in abandoned webbed closets, one of those things found on the desert all long and scattered like dice!”
Despite the best advise from his doctor and his wife, Mr. Harris could not leave it alone until he found the strange, little M. Munigant and his terrible cure.
4 stars

The Jar

”It was just one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you…”
Charlie bought the jar from the carney and took it back to his farm. It transformed him into a Somebody — country folks came to wonder and jaw about what it might be. But his wife was cold and evil — she couldn’t abide Charlie’s new found fame, and she couldn’t leave well enough alone. Absolutely chilling!
5 stars

The Lake

”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.”
Summers end. Childhood ends. Life ends. A loss at 12 is particularly profound. Ten years later, it all comes back…
This one never fails to set my hairs on end.
5 stars

The Emissary

”Martin knew it was Autumn again, for Dog ran into the house bringing wind and frost and a smell of apples turned to cider under trees…Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, sawdust from fresh-cut cordwood…No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!”
Dog brings the outside world to Martin. Sometimes he brings friends home to visit with the sick boy. And sometimes Dog likes to dig. But Dog stayed out too long, Dog dug too deep, and one night he brought home…
How can anything be simultaneously as beautiful and as terrifying as this story?
5 stars

Touched With Fire

This oppressively hot tale of summer heat, and frayed, homicidal nerves is excellent, but feels out of season in this October collection.
3 stars

The Small Assassin

A new mother almost dies in Caesarian childbirth and is convinced her baby is trying to kill her. What if she’s not wrong? Terrifying!
4 stars

The Crowd

”Where the crowd came from he didn’t know. He struggled to remain aware and then faces hemmed in upon him like the large glowing leaves of down-bent trees…How swiftly the crowd comes, he thought, like the iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere.”
How does a crowd gather so fast after an accident? Where do they all come from? And why do certain faces reappear in every gathering crowd? Do they sense the results, or cause them?
A chillingly sinister tale.
4 stars

Jack-In-The-Box

Edwin is a strange child in a strange house with a strange mother. The large house is his world — his mother will not permit him to venture out beyond, where the great beasts killed Edwin’s father before he was born. Edwin knows only the house, knows only mother and teacher, and he never sees them together. Then one day, it all changed, terrifyingly and wondrous.
An eerie, disquieting tale.
4 stars

The Scythe

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.
Dust Bowl creepy dark.
3 stars

Uncle Einar

A vampire flys through the night with cords full of his wife’s wet laundry to dry it. This should tell you all you need to know about this whimsical, fun little tale.
4 stars

The Wind

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.
5 stars

The Man Upstairs

Something is odd, odd and wrong, Douglas thinks, with his grandma’s new boarder. He carried no silver change, and eats his meals with wooden fork and knife. But Douglas is just a boy, and no one is listening. So Douglas must take action himself.
4 stars

There Was An Old Woman

Aunt Tildy refused to believe in Death, even when he came for her. But when he made off with her body anyhow, she set out to get it back, and woe to anyone who got in her way!
4 stars

The Cistern

Two colorless sisters living alone together. One of the sisters dreams passionately morose dreams of dead romance beneath the city. When the dream becomes more real than the reality…
4 stars

Homecoming

Another whimsical vampire story. Whole extended family of vampires gathers for a family reunion.
4 stars

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone

”Stone, on the brink of his greatest work, turned one day and went off to live in a town we shall call Obscurity by the sea best named The Past.”
Promising, genius writer, Dudley Stone, mysteriously gave up writing and moved out of the public eye at 30. Years later, fans who still remember his promise debate why, and one sets out to find an answer.
4 stars

[Apatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am quite useless at reviewing an anthologies so please bear with me. How do you go about reviewing these things any way? Story by story? Sounds like a chore. I'll just muddle through as usual then!

The October Country is a collection of Ray Bradbury's macabre stories, I hesitate to label them as "horror stories" because they are not particularly horrifying, but they are mostly odd and unsettling, almost "new weird" but disqualified on the "new" part! The iIllustrations by Joe Mugnaini (a few are shown below) add a surreal atmosphere to the stories. I will just run through them quickly:

"Dwarf" - A little strange, ends before it should for me, no clear denouement, but a good little morality tale.


"The Next in Line" - I like the gradation of depths for burial based on the wealth of the family. There is a very creepy, psychologically unsettling scene in the catacombs. I find the story goes on too long yet the ending is a little too abrupt (too "WTF" if you will). I do love the lyricism and poetic rhythm of his writing though.
"The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" - A humorous observation about the pretentious avant garde. Nice one!
"Skeleton" - That is gross man! LOL! A darkly humorous story. OK, this one is a bit horrifying. I love it!


"The Jar" - I like how the entire story revolves around the mysterious content of the jar, the twist at the end is cool.
"The Lake" - The first overtly supernatural tale in this book, a sentimental and sad little ghost story.
"The Emissary" - Unexpected twist in this one, to say any more would spoil it. Great story!
"Touched With Fire" - The story of a couple of retired insurance salesmen and a perpetually angry woman who is a sort of Angry Bird in human form.
"The Small Assassin" - My favorite story in this book, give me the collywobbles! I'm not saying anything about the plot!
"The Crowd" - The crowd that materialize in accident scenes are indeed reprehensible. Good story.
"Jack-in-the-Box" - A weird scifi-ish story. Have you seen M. Night Shyamalan 2004 movie The Village? This story is a bit like that (well, no, that movie is a bit like this, which predates it).
"The Scythe" - Don't fear the Reaper, or don't fear the reaping. This story left a singularly eerie image in my mind after reading.


"Uncle Einar" - A pleasant, lighthearted story. Not creepy at all.
"The Wind" - Supernatural, creepy and sad.
"The Man Upstairs" - an excellent vampire tale with triangles, chains, and pyramids - genius!
"There Was an Old Woman" - Annoying bloody woman, good for a giggle.
"The Cistern" - A weird watery tale which is almost a ghost story.
"Homecoming" - "They're creepy and they're kooky, Mysterious and spooky" - actually may be more like "The Munster".
"The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" - Strange mainstream-ish story. It is actually quite wonderful, a great way to end the book.

TL;DR: My favorite stories are "Skeleton", "The Small Assassin" and "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone".

Probably not Bradbury's best collection but Bradbury is always well worth reading. The best Ray Bradbury anthology is - IMO - The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles is great but it is more of a fix-up novel.

As I write it is almost Halloween, the best time to read this collection!

[Ethan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The October Country is a collection of nineteen short stories by Ray Bradbury. I read two things online about this collection before reading it: it's scary (don't read it at night), and it really gives you the October feeling. Sadly, neither of these things are true, or at least they weren't for me. The stories aren't even horror for the most part; they're more like weird fiction, and I didn't find any of them to be scary. Some of them are actually pretty funny.

Similarly, I didn't really get the fall/October feeling from the vast majority of these stories. I think he described fall things like rustling leaves on the ground or the biting wind or the way the grass turns colour in one or two stories, maybe three or four, but that was it, out of nineteen stories. So I didn't really get scared or into the fall mood from this collection, which was a real letdown.

On the plus side, some of the stories are pretty good, although I only thought one out of the nineteen stories deserved a five-star rating. Some of the stories, like Jack-in-the-box, were a refreshing mix of fantasy, horror, and comedy, which worked quite well.

One thing I have to mention, because I've seen it in numerous Bradbury books now, is Bradbury excessively repeating himself! What...is..up...with...that? It's like he's trying to make everything sound like an echo, or pad his word totals so he can get his work to a publishable length. He often repeats entire sentences, not just individual words. Why didn't any of his editors mention it or remove these repetitions? It's really, really annoying...especially since he does it about a hundred times per book. Here are some examples:


Ridiculous. M. Munigant was okay, okay...

Click went the camera and Joseph rolled the film. Click went the camera and Joseph rolled the film.

to raving mouth, wall to wall, wall to wall, again, again

She shook her head back and forth, back and forth.

It's so funny, so funny.

M. Munigant's voice got small, small, tiny, tiny.

It sloshed back and forth, back and forth. Sloshed wet. And the cold gray thing drowsily slumped against the glass, looking out, looking out, but seeing nothing, nothing

Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in.

Just wait, just wait. It may hurt, but there's only one way. Here, here...


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:

The Dwarf: 2/5
The Next in Line: 1/5
The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse: 2.5/5
Skeleton: 3.5/5
The Jar: 4/5
The Lake: 5/5
The Emissary: 3.5/5
Touched With Fire: 3.5/5
The Small Assassin: 4.5/5
The Crowd: 2.5/5
Jack-in-the-box: 2.5/5
The Scythe: 3.5/5
Uncle Einar: 4/5
The Wind: 4/5
The Man Upstairs: 4.5/5
There Was an Old Woman: 4.5/5
The Cistern: 2/5
Homecoming: 3.5/5
The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone: 4.5/5

65/95 = 68.42% = 3.42 stars

[Ginger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury! I’m so glad I read this book in October with the leaves coming down, the air was crisp and Halloween was around the corner. It really added to the overall atmosphere for the book.

Favorite short stories:
“The Next in Line”, “Skeleton”, “The Emissary”, “The Small Assassin” and “The Scythe”!

Bradbury’s writing is so beautiful, flawless and fantastical. I definitely recommend this collection to Bradbury fans and anyone that enjoys horror and fantasy genres!

[Maciek · Rating 4 out of 5]

October Country...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain...

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.

My copy of The October Country has a new introduction by Ray Bradbury, written in 1999, where he claims to remembering being born and the development of his passion for stories and storytelling. He wrote his first story in the seventh grade, and since the age of twelve knew that was the way to ensure proper immortality - being remembered after our limited time on earth runs out. Bradbury saw the process of writing as a match between life and death, each completed story a victory. Days when he didn't write were threatening him extinction, and this is why he wrote every day since he turned twelve, evading death. He died last year, at the age of 91, having published his last novel - Farewell Summer - six years before, along with hundreds of short stories. Death has finally caught with Ray, but not before he had his say - he went out on his own terms, and achieved the exact type of immortality that he hoped for.

The October Country contains nineteen very different stories, most of which were previously published in Bradbury's debut colection, Dark Carnival. These are some of Bradbury's earliest stories, published before The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. There is a special pleasure in reading these stories - allowing Ray Bradbury's gentle storytelling lull us in and expose us to his imagination. I can see young Kings and Mathesons of this world reading his fiction deep into the night, possibly even with a flashlight under the bedcovers, amazed that a grownup could think such things onto paper. Bradbury was a man who could both turn a phrase and had a great, big heart - his warmth emanates from his writing, which is far removed from the vulgarity of contemporary world. Bradbury was often accused of being too sentimental and too emotional, but I don't think this is completely correct - while it's true that his stories offer a bucolic vision of the American heartland and the nostalgia of small-town life, but didn't shy away from showing the nastiness running behind the curtain of these idealistic visions.

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.

The Lake is another touching and sad story, but in another way - it's about a man who revisits his childhood home and is flooded with memories of a lost friend. It's almost a ghost story, but not quite - the ghosts are the memories which flood the main character to the point where he almost re-enters the past, and feels disconnected from - and disappointed with - the present reality.

There are great stories with a touch of horror here, too. The Skeleton and The Small Assassin both have great, imaginative premises and work very well. The first one features a man convinced that his skeleton is out to kill him - and tries to fight it; it concludes with a great, memorable last line, true to style of classic short fiction. The Small Assassin is Bradbury's experiment with psychological horror - a woman becomes convinced that her newborn baby is conspiring to kill her. While this might seem to be just an example of postnatal stress and depression, the arguments she uses sound at least a bit true: is there anything in the world more selfish than a baby, with its unending demand for constant care and attention? Do some mothers (and fathers) do not have the feeling that sometimes their baby is acting the way it does just to spite and annoy them? This is a great horror story without vampires or boogeymen, but with cribs, nappies and milk bottles. The last line, again, is a killer - literally!

There are more horrific stories here: The Next in Line features a couple exploring a cemetery in a small Mexican town which holds a truly capitalistic policy towards the buried and their families; The Crowd is another great story which truly emphasizes Bradbury's great strength: exploring simple ideas and writing classic tales based on them. Its narrator finds it odd that crowds of spectators always gather around the scene of an accident, and finds people who would stare at someone's tragedy reprehensible: the truth is stranger than any of us could suspect. Same goes for The wind, where a man is obsessed with wind - he's an adventurer who thinks that wind has always been out there to get him, and even though he always managed to escape he's convinced that this time his luck has finally ran out. There was an Old Woman is different, in the way that it takes a scary situation and makes it amusing: it's concerned with an old, cantankerous woman who just refuses to die. It's good and full of fun humor.

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.

My favorite story from the entire collection is probably The Scythe, which is a great, imaginative story, in the nature of the folk tales that I read as a young boy. Set in what looks like the Depression, a poor family notices an empty house at the end of a road, and upon entering discovers the body of a previous inhabitant and his will - bequeathing both the house and farm behind it to the person reading it. The family is overjoyed at first, and after a few days of rest the father cannot sit still anymore and goes to cut wheat in the field - only to discover strange things about it, and the way it grows. It's a great story in the classic tradition of moral tales - that there will always be a price to pay for what seems to be too good to be true, and that we should be wary of things which seem to be just incredible luck.

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone is a great coda - Dudley Stone is an extraordinarily successful writer who has quit the profession at the age of 30, without explanation, leaving people without any certainty if he was even alive or dead. 25 years later a group of his most devoted fans cannot bear not knowing, and one of them decides to go to Stone's hometown and find information about him. It's a great story to end the collection, a meditation on the choices we make in life and the things we set as priorities, with a beautiful last line.

I could very well discuss all the stories, but I believe that the reader deserves the pleasure to discover the October Country on their own, especially with illustrations by Joe Mugnaini. So come along and open the book to visit that country, the country dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay, whose people are autumn people thinking autumn thoughts, and who on the empty walks at night sound like rain...

[Fernando · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.
Algunos cuentos están muy bien logrados, y los trabaja a partir de la obsesión del personaje principal, tal es el caso del señor Harris en el cuento "Esqueleto", en donde el personaje se obsesiona en una batalla en contra de su propio esqueleto con un final digno de "El extraño caso del señor Valdemar" de Edgar Allan Poe.
En otros, un hombre compra en una feria una jarra que contiene una horrorosa criatura que de algún modo hechiza a cada uno que la ve. El cuento se llama precisamente "La jarra".
"El enano" es otro cuento narrado alrededor de la misteriosa y (nuevamente debo utilizar ese término) ominosa figura de un enano cuyo costado diabólico inquieta a una mujer en un extraño parque de diversiones.
Yendo a lo tradicional, "El lago" es una historia de fantasmas, adornada con un poco de sentimentalismo adolescente.
"El pequeño asesino" es un cuento macabro y retorcido en el que una madre y posteriormente el esposo creen que su bebé de pocos meses intenta matarlos. Realmente escabroso, especialmente su final. El mejor del libro para mí
"La multitud" es otro cuento siniestro. En tan solo diez páginas, Bradbury nos cuenta acerca de un grupo de personas que aparece espontáneamente cada que vez que hay un accidente automovilístico. Al parecer, desde el más allá. Espeluznante.
El relato "Caja de sorpresas" pareciera haber sido un guión con el que M. Night Shyamalan desarrolló la película "La aldea". La trama es casi idéntica y está narrado de manera majestuosa. Quien haya visto la película la asociará a este cuento instantáneamente.
Otro gran cuento del libro se llama "La guadaña", en el que un hombre y su familia arriban a una cabaña escapando del hambre. Allí encuentran que un viejo ha muerto y les ha cedido todas su posesiones y una portentosa guadaña con una inscripción que dice 'Quien me maneja, ¡Maneja el mundo!' Podrán darse cuenta hacia dónde se orienta la narración...
Un hombre sugestionado cree que el viento es una presencia sobrenatural que desea matarlo en el cuento "El viento".
Muy tenebroso es el cuento de vampiros "El hombre del primer piso". En él, Bradbury nos sorprende con una adaptación muy bien lograda de este tipo de leyendas.
La tía Tildy, recién muerta se va a la morgue a reclamar su propio cadáver, armando un lío fenomenal en el desopilante cuento "Había una vez una vieja". Qué cuento tan original...
En las Vísperas de todos los Santos, se produce una "Reunión de familia", que es un tierno cuento sobre el reencuentro de más de cien familiares. Obviamente, están todos muertos.
El cuento que cierra el libro, "La maravillosa muerte de Dudley Stone", no narra la muerte física de ese personaje, sino de su muerte literaria y de cómo esta, paradójicamente lo mantuvo vivo el resto de sus días.
"El país de octubre" es un agradable libro lleno de historias extrañas, tenebrosas, atemorizantes y por qué no, también llenas de situaciones, personajes y ambientes muy originales. Tan originales como este genio llamado Ray Bradbury.

[Lizz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t write reviews.

How was this so beautiful? What magic did Bradbury access, which allowed the formation of sentences succinct yet poetic, cutting to the heart of the matter of all things? The words could reach in and awaken parts of me long sleeping, reanimate memories long forgotten. Bradbury knew this kind of magic, that juxtaposition of language and emotion locked in a dance that will continue eternally.

[Fabian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Watch "The Twilight Show" (even any other "derivative" of that show for that matter, i.e. anything from Perversions of Science to Black Mirror to Tales from the Crypt) and those goosebumps that develop ever so sinister-like? Every story in this collection earns that type of unforgettable excitement: the pure thrill of being scared. And by no other than this maestro. Hard to believe that the master was with me, personally, all along. I still remember coming across "Something Wicked this Way Comes" in middle school and thinking how awful that true terror is available to all people equally: you are not immune because you of your sex, race, and age. It is a common thread that unites us; whether it be bodily terror, or psychological torment, or straight-up monster mash. Being scared.

My favorite short story (all of them are as perfect as can be): Skeleton.

[Algernon · Rating 4 out of 5]

... that country were it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilight linger, and midnights stay. The country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain ...

The introduction suggests this one's a good choice for a Halloween read, and indeed the stories selected for the present collection may not all happen in October, but they do share a melancholic mood that often morphs into full blown fright. I am thinking of adding as a subtitle High Anxiety for the whole set and then play a game of 'Name That Fear' for each episode:

The Dwarf is a great opening gambit, probably one of the earliest shorts written by the author, illustrating his fascination with carnivals and with the grotesque. A short man visits every night the hall of mirrors in the amusement park, always heading straight for the one distorting silverbacked glass that makes him appear as tall as regular people. The ticket vendor makes fun of him with the callous indifference of bullies everywhere. The anxiety here would be the loneliness of the person rejected from society for being different in appearance. I liked how the dwarf is presented as a succesful pulp writer, how inside his head he's just as good, if not better, than his tormentors:

This little guy's got a soul as big as all outdoors; he's got everything in his head!

The Next In Line highlights the fear of the cemeteries, of the dark, damp and smelly place undergound where the dead are buried. A young couple on a tourist visit to Mexcio comes across a town where the air is so dry that bodies do not rot in the ground and are instead mummified. Because a lot of the local people are too poor to pay for the burial place, these mummies are exhumated and stored in a long underground chamber and then shown to the tourists for a small fee. I have saved a quote from this story, where the young man chides his wife for being superstitious, but I have a hunch that the author sides with her on the issue, as sometimes the fear is too strong for the rational brain:

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

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.

Skeleton is fear of illness, of your own body. It is the tale of a hypochondriac who goes to a dubious doctor and becomes aware that he has been walking around all his life carrying a skeleton inside him. Delightfully macabre.

The Jar is a second story that starts with a carnival and its gallery of freaks. It is a variant of the fear of the unknown, and a story about the way our imagination can create monsters out of unexplained physical or biological objects. Here, a farmer becomes fascinated with one of those pale and wobbly things floating in chloroform in big transparent bottles. Ignorance and superstition also play a role, as the man's neighbors from a poor swamp village gather around the jar to speculate on the thing's origins.

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 Emissary is another variant of the fear of death. In this short story, a boy is immobilized in bed by illness, and his trusty dog is his only contact with the outside world, by bringing in the twigs and burrs and the smells of the places it visits. But what happens when this dog starts visiting a cemetery too often?

Touched With Fire is more difficult to pin down. Two mysterious strangers try to prevent a woman from getting murdered. Are they prescient or simply better observers of human nature than usual? I would class the story as fear of predestination, of the loss of free will, but a more accurate message may be that we cannot force people to act against their nature.

The Small Assassin is a creepy example of a woman with post-natal depression, who believes her child tried to kill her during a difficult birth, and is continuing to attack her after they return home from hospital. It's a clever piece, but not one of my favorites: it fels contrived, even if I accept the supernatural elements.

The Crowd is an illustration of a fear I was spared from until recently. I got my driver's license only a couple of years ago, and my first car only months ago. Since then, I have started to consider more seriously what would happen if I got into a road accident. Bradbury doesn't help me much as he tries to prove that there is a reason you always see a crowd of thrill seekers around the sites of such crashes, and that these people are not there to help you.

Jack-In-The-Box is about a boy who is afraid the whole world outside his house is gone. He is locked in with his mother and a mysterious teacher inside a huge house with many locked doors and secret passages. He would like to escape, yet is afraid of what would happen if he breaks out of his safe daily routine.

The Scythe is a good candidate for a 'Best of ...' anthology of Bradbury short stories. It's major anxiety is the fear of a father that he cannot provide sustenance and safety for his family during the Great Depression, most of all that he cannot protect them from the death that must come to us all, sooner or later. Great writing!

Uncle Einar is one of the few happy interludes in an otherwise sad and scary collection. It is a sketch from a bigger story the author was developing about a family of monsters ( The Elliots are similar in many aspects to the more famous Adams Family). Einar is a sort of human bat, six feet tall with big leathery green wings. He flies mostly at night to avoid being spotted by regular people, but after a drunken party, he crashes into a power line and loses his sonar-like abilities. But, like somebody sung about in the Alps, whenever a door closes, a window opens, and by losing his fly-in-the-dark talents, Einar gains the love of a woman and settles down for married life and for playing with his children. My favorite quote here is about how we may be homely in our outside appearance, but there is a world of wonder and imagination inside each of us:

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 Wind is another candidate for 'best of' anthologies, very short but also very effective in the idea that destructive winds somehow achieve intelligence by absorbing the minds of their victims. The fear category in my game could be the anxiety over the unleashed forces of nature.

The Man Upstairs is a variant of the fear of the stranger, about supernatural predators living amonst us, disguised as ordinary people. What makes the story special is the young age of the narrator, a young boy whose curiosity and inventivity solves the mystery. Word of the day from his grandfather:

Fear nothing, ever in your life.

There Was an Old Woman is another of the rare stories with a touch of humour, with a colourful elderly lady as a heroine who refuses to accept the inevitability of Death, and is ready to fight to the last breath and beyond for the right to stay in this world as much as it pleases her.

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.

Homecoming is almost worth the price of admission all on its own. It marks a return to the follies of the Elliott family, as they gather from all over the world to celebrate Halloween together. Uncle Einar also returns to lift up the spirits of a boy without supernatural talents, adopted into the family and slightly envious of his 'monster' relatives. The story has a lot of potential, and I understand Bradbury added more material until it became a novel. Anxiety in this case is the result of feeling estranged from your peers.

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone ends the book not with another scare but with an affirmation of life, an invitation to get our noses out of books and run around in the sun. Dudley Moore was a very promising young writer who decided decades ago to renounce his literary career and fade into oblivion. In the present time, he invites a reporter to tell him all about that past decision and the reason for his seclusion:

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.

Taken as a whole I found the collection uneven in quality. Some stories feel unpolished, some just simple sketches, but then quite a few are truly memorable, and even the lesser ones display the magical way Bradbury has of creating a mood, an emotion, an intriguing new way to look at the ordinary things around us and see either their beauty or their mystery. Beside the theme of autumn and anxiety, the stories collected here share an interest in childhood, in the ties of family and in the need for friendship and sharing. I am glad I still have so many of his stories and novels still to read. I am sure they will be as enjoyable and well written as this one.

[Jamie Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

The October Country: a book of strange, sometimes creepy, sometimes heart warming tales, written in Ray Bradbury’s flawless excitable style. You can tell from these pages that the man loved to write, in someways his words are like those of a child’s discovering a new love for the first time, it’s an enthusiasm that captivated me.

My favourite stories within this book are:

The Dwarf
The Jar
The Lake
The Emissary
The Little Assassin
Uncle Einar

I noticed when reading them that it wasn’t until each story was finished that I could fully contemplate what I had just read. Take The Emissary for example it begins as this brilliant, heart warming story that sinks into terror only in the last three paragraphs. I also noticed that in a lot of these stories it’s left for the readers imagination in such stories as The Next In Line, Jack In The Box and The Crowd. The Little Assassin is terrifying throughout. The Lake is one of the most touching pieces of fiction I’ve never read.

Don’t look to be scared is my only recommendation with these stories, come at this book with no expectations and it will hold a bounty of surprises for you.

[TheNeverendingTBR · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a good mix of stories in this collection involving circus freaks, vampires, ghosts & innocence.

Like most short story collections though, there's hits and misses.

My favourite from this collection was The Dwarf.

I wish the endings were better in these stories though because they end abruptly and will leave you thinking "That's it??"

[Meisha (ALittleReader) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Although i gave The October Country a 3.5, its actually one of the best short story collections i have ever read! Just like any short story collection, there were some stories that i loved and some i didnt care for as much. Although it was pretty balanced, there were more that i liked than i disliked in this collection. But that is ultimately what lead me to my decision not to give this book the full five stars.
So far, i havent read anything by Ray Bradbury that i dont like. If youre looking for something perfect to get you into autumn, this author is who to turn to. I often find that the very essence and of the autumn season hangs on Bradbury's every word. A dark and eerie foreboding in all of his books that ive come to love and recognize as Bradbury's writting. This one was no different.
In this particular book though, i especially enjoyed the deep dive and analysis into the very character of humanity. His understanding of what makes us human absolutely blew my mind and made for a very interesting, intruiging and thought provoking read.
Im so glad that i got around to this one this year. This one was a win! :)

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone reading my review of Something Wicked this way Comes might possibly get the idea that I don't think Ray Bradbury is the godlike genius I used to think he was. Well, I don't. But I was like this stupid kid, I hadn't read anything, and stumbling into RB's world was my 13 year old version of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Suddenly - Light! Colour! Weirdness! Mars!
He did sentimentality - everyone knows that, buckets of the stuff - but he also did gruesome and freaky. The October Country was the gruesome stuff. Such great stories as (this is a sprinkling entirely from memory)

- The Dwarf - in which the owner of a Hall of Mirrors and a young carnival-goer observe a dwarf who uses the mirrors to make himself seem taller. That's so creepy. It is though, isn't it! Also, not especially PC.

- 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.

- 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

- The Emissary – wow what a shocker, boy is laid up in bed, only companion his jolly dog – dog feels sorry for him, goes and gets him a friend to visit – some neighbourhood woman – anyway, she dies, boo hoo – undaunted, dog goes off and fetches her back…from the cemetery – this story has been ripped off more times than I’ve had hot dinners, and that, my friends, is a lot of times

- The Small Assassin - a woman becomes convinced her newborn baby is out to kill her ! Wild!

- The Crowd - A man discovers something odd about the crowds which form around accidents. They’re always the same people! – reminds me of a great song by Magazine called Shot By Both Sides (I wormed my way to the heart of the crowd/I was shocked to see what was allowed)

So, Bradbury - I salute your gorgeous prose poetry infused horror and your frankly bizarre ideas and your acknowledgement of the terrors suffered by children, no, not just the ones being badly treated, all children, these are the terrors which live in your little head when you're a kid, Bradbury knew it all and he didn't forget it. You made me sorry I didn't live in Green Town Illinois and you made me even sorrier that i finally, with much protesting and complaining, grew up.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This might be a re-read... but for the most part, I had forgotten much of what I read here from way back in the day.

No matter.

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.

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!"

Ahem. Bradbury has great ideas! Bradbury has wonderful prose! Yes. But he's also mild. I love writers that take ideas and do something extraordinary, and back when these were written, that was probably the case.

Something to consider: His story "Touched with Fire" has a great, perhaps apocryphal, line about more murders occurring at 92 degrees F than any other temperature. It was used in the 70's B movie It Came From Outer Space. And then it was used in a great song by Siouxsie and the Banshees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIqyV...

I was all, like... I love that song! Another fun fact, Siouxsie's punk music also does full tributes to Stephen King and Shakespeare. Much love. :)

Oh, I hated the story "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" :)

Everything else was fine, if not super-grabbing. :)

[Javier Ventura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Han hecho falta 141 páginas, 7 relatos y una enorme resistencia al abandono que podríamos calificar casi de gallardía lectora, para llegar a “El emisario”, y convencerme que podía seguir intentando leer y quien sabe si hasta terminar esta recopilación de relatos de Ray Bradbury, afamado escritor adscrito principalmente al género de la Ciencia Ficción, aunque esta temática está ausente en esta recopilación, a favor fundamentalmente del terror y la fantasía extraña.
Curiosamente, llegado al ecuador del libro, ya sea porque mejoraban la calidad e interés de los relatos, ya sea porque me he ido adaptando al estilo poético y misterioso aunque poco fluido de Bradbury, he acabado disfrutando bastante de la mayoría de los cuentos, e incluso he podido rememorar con cierta mejoría algunos de los que había leído previamente y no me habían gustado.
Las ideas que desarrolla Bradbury en sus historias son interesantes u originales y en muchos casos casi diría que precursoras de otras historias de terror que hemos conocido después. Pero la ejecución de las mismas y el estilo narrativo resulta un poco incómodo de leer para mi gusto. Como he dicho antes, fluye regular. Habrá quien le guste así, pero no es mi caso; a veces me atascaba leyendo o directamente pensando en otra cosa. Yo no me atrevería a recomendar estos cuentos a un lector estándar de terror y fantasía.
Puedo destacar los siguientes relatos que han hecho ser valedora a esta recopilación de una tercera y flamante estrella:
- El emisario
- El pequeño asesino
- La multitud
- La guadaña
- El viento
- El hombre del primer piso
- La maravillosa muerte de Dudley Stone

[Ivana Books Are Magic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published in 1955, The October Country is a wonderful collection of macabre short stories. The stories are of exceptional quality, exactly what one would expect from a writer as acclaimed as Ray Bradbury. Even the stories that weren't my cup of tea impressed me with the beautiful writing, wonderful characterization and attention to details. I'll review all of the stories separately. Avoiding spoilers in reviews is never easy, but it is especially challenging when it comes to short stories, so I'll keep my reviews brief.

THE DWARF 4/5
The opening story of this collection is a bit depressive in tone, but it is well written. A girl wants to help a dwarf feel better about himself, but she makes things worse. The characters are well portrayed and the dialogues are convincing. It is written a bit like murder story, but the ending isn't clear cut (even if it is not that difficult to asses what it is to come).

THE WATCHFUL POKER CHIC OF H.MATISSE 4/5
Entertaining but quite dark story about a man who will go to great lengths to keep his social contacts. Lacking a talent for socializing, the protagonist of this book is willing to sacrifice a part of himself to remain a welcome guest on parties. The story itself is very well written and witty, but what I liked most of all is the comment on human need for companionship.

SKELETON 4/5
Wonderfully written horror story about a man hunted by his own skeleton. The tension increased with every page. The ending was a bit predictable, but not less scary because of it. I was also impressed with the characterization and the dialogues themselves. The characters really came to life in this one.

THE JAR 4/5
Another story with elements of horror. A man purchases a jar in an effort to have something of interest to show. His wife is always about, travelling to her parents and he doesn't seem able to keep her around. The mysterious jar is both frightening and fascinating. It starts attraction visitors, each of them seeing something else in it. Wonderfully written, The Jar held my interest to the end.


THE TRAVELLER 5/5
The first story in the collection that is about the FAMILY. I loved reading about Cecy, a girl who spends her days in bed, but has great powers of mind. I enjoyed all the stories about the family, but it was only in the last one that I figured out who they really were.

THE EMISSARY 4/5
The emissary is a dark story with elements of horror, perhaps it could even be said to be a horror story. It tells a story of a boy who because of his illness has to stay in bed. However, the boy has a dog who brings him news about the outside world. That's just the start, but I don't want to spoil the ending so I won't say much. It was an interesting story to read, I liked the dark atmosphere.

TOUCHED WITH FIRE 5/5
This is an absolutely brilliant story about two men who having retired from selling life insurance study human psychology and thus discover that people often cause their own death- in an unconscious way. They want to help one lady, but as it turns out, some people are beyond help.

THE SCYTHE 5/5
A starving family of four wonders onto a farm, only to find a dead owner who leaves the farm to whoever finds it. They are happy because they have a roof over their head and they don't have to worry about starving to death, but there is something strange about the farm. This was such a beautifully written and tragic story that references the legend of the grim reaper. It talks about our inability to escape destiny.

UNCLE ENAIR 5/5
Another story that speaks about the mysterious family, this time just one member of it. He is a winged man who gets injured in a storm and is taken in by a kind young lady. This story felt very fairy-tale in tone and it even ended up on a happy note. The only story in this book that could be described as cheerful. The others are either tragic or bitter sweet.

THE WIND 5/5
A wonderful short story about a man hunted by a wild. Not only kind of wind, a predatory kind that takes the souls from its victims. Very well written and quite convincing in the matter it was told! For most of the story, this man communicates with his best friend on the phone and the tension is established by the fact we are not certain of his sanity. Maybe he is imagining everything?

THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN 5/5
A very funny story about a girl who refused to die and became an old women who will fight death with whatever she has!

HOMECOMING 5/5
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.

THE WONDERFUL DEATH OF DUDLEY STONE 5/5
One of the most touching stories that I have read on the subject of writing. Absolutely precious! It describes why and how a famous writer decided to retire at age thirty...and kept his word- never wrote anything else. At the eve of his life, he decides to tell the whole story to a man who comes searching for it.

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spooktober read #2!

I always make sure to have a Bradbury book or two at hand for October, because nothing goes better with his stories than trees slowly blushing red and gold, a hot whiskey toddy and a blanket scarf (and perhaps Rachel Bloom singing her masterpiece: www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1IxOS4VzKM). “The October Country” is obviously the perfect short story collection for the first crisp autumn days (or evenings), as it is stuffed with creepy and macabre settings and characters. The magic of Bradbury’s prose works its spell from the first page, and sent more than a few chills down my spine as I traveled through this country “where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist”.

Something about Bradbury’s stories gives me the kind of sharp little pain that only the very best writers can make their readers feel, a quick cut that will leave us changed. But there is also a gentle warmth that keeps that pain from being too much: you might be unsettled reading some of his stories, but you also trust that he will keep you safe. As I explored this collection, I went from smiling, to wincing, to wide-eyed shock, to tears, and then back to smiling.

“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.

There are some weaker stories in there, but not a bad one as far as I am concerned. I will be revisiting this one, and I will always save it for this time of the year.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid writing with some great atmospheric tension! As always in collections, some stories stand out for me more than others. I doubt that I will forget the lingering, oppressive feelings of "Jack-in-the-Box" anytime soon. Another that keeps coming to mind was The Dwarf. I can say that there are some stories that will "click" with almost everyone out there--something to suit everyone's tastes.

Highly recommended!

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

The theme of this collection, as the title suggests, is autumn. As Neil Gaiman once said, Bradbury is to experienced in October and after reading three of his books as well as this short story collection, I quite agree. He seems to have loved this time of year as much as I do, as is evidenced by this "introduction" to The October Country:

October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . .

If this beautiful prose doesn't express the author's love for autumn, I don't know what will.

Personally, I'm right there with the author. Everything about this time of year - from the fog that casts everything into an eerie light and amplifies sounds in a weird way, to the crisp fresh air that has a unique smell, as well as the breathtaking colour of the foliage and cool storms, not to mention Halloween, carving pumpkins, decorating the house ... I love everything about it.

So what about the 19 stories here, you ask? Well, like I said, there were ups and downs. My favourites were
- The Lake
- The Emissary
- Jack-in-the-Box
- The Scythe
but "The Next in Line" was great, too.

As is typical for Bradbury, he used the stories to not only create an autumn-y feel for the reader but to also address topics such as religion, love, death and many more. He was one of few authors who managed to slip in sentences ringing true with profound meaning as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Nevertheless, many of the stories here just couldn't quite grab me.

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

ray bradbury’s classic collection of nineteen short stories that make up the october country paired with joseph mugnaini’s illustrations both haunt and delight. inviting the strange and the macabre; allowing the demons that lurk in the average individual’s everyday life to take centre stage, bradbury’s beautifully written prose is perfect for the autumn and halloween season. wait until the sun sets, light a candle, get under a blanket, and read - he will not disappoint.

“…that country where it is always turning late in the year. that country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. that country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coalbins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. that country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain . . .”

[Benji's Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great collection of tales of the melancholy and macabre!

I don't believe there was a single story that I didn't like, but there were a handful that stood out above the rest, such as the Crowd, the Small Asassin, and the Scythe (the last being my personal favorite).

Not including the mandatory Farenheit 451° read I was assigned in school, this is my first real read by him. Since 451° was an assigned read for the class, I never really put my heart into reading it, so I will for sure have to read it again.

Other than that, I've only seen the animated "the Halloween Tree" and 1983 live-action adaptation of "Something Wicked This Way Comes", both of which were so great, I imagine, because Bradbury himself was attached to them.

But after this read, those will for sure not be my last works of his.

Highly recommended!

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I forget about Mr Bradbury and when I remember I curse myself for not reading more. Anyone is capable of producing a picture which paints a thousand words, Mr Bradbury is capable of giving birth to words which paint a thousand pictures. That’s some feat! The man is a true master who uses this art to deliver incredible tales which makes you blow your cheeks out, sit back and smile.

Except the one in here which must have been written on a bad acid trip.

I love the short stories, but also hate 'em. There’s not enough here to get your teeth into at times, but I suppose to leave us wanting more is part of the art.

Just sublime….

EDIT: Christ, I really must stop writing reviews when I'm drunk!

[HaMiT · Rating 4 out of 5]

توی سه تا از داستان های این کتاب، یکی از شخصیت ها دچار پارانویا هست و هر سه داستان زیبا و جذابن

داستان آدم کش کوچولو که مادر یک نوزاد فکر میکنه بچه ی کوچیکش قصد کشتنش رو داره

داستان جمعیت که در آن مردی پس از تصادف، در مورد جمعیتی که بالای سر تصادف ها جمع میشن دچار شک و تردید میشه

و داستان باد که مردی فکر میکنه که باد به دنبالش هست

باقی داستان ها به جز داستان آخر زیبا بودند

البته فقط یکی از داستان های کتاب علمی تخیلیه

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great collection of classic short horror stories by Ray Bradbury. There is no shock and awe here, like you might find from more modern horror writers. Rather, there are well-crafted and well-written tales of suspense, horror and atmosphere. It is an excellent read for the Halloween season.