“We are the October People, the autumn folk. That is the truth in an almond husk, a nightweed shell.”

• Title: From the Dust Returned
• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Genre: Horror/Fantasy
• Year: 2001

From the Dust Returned is another trip with Ray Bradbury into October Country, this time located roughly in upper Illinois. It is a fix-up novel in the vein of The Martian Chronicles, collecting short stories from several previous Bradbury anthologies — most prominently The October Country — and weaving them together with new material into an episodic but thematically coherent novel that tells the story of one very unusual family.

It is a story that Bradbury says he has been revisiting for decades (from 1945 to 2000), without ever really realizing it. Fans will recognize many of the stories and characters here — from Cecy the irrepressible rider of souls to the winged Uncle Einar. From the Dust Returned takes these old friends and finally meshes all their stories together into one narrative history of the Elliott family — a many-generationed clan with their origins in ancient Egypt. The Elliotts are, for lack of a better term, creatures of the night.

From the Dust Returned is essentially an extended riff on ‘Homecoming’ and the shorts related to it such as ‘Uncle Einar’ (both in The October Country) and ‘West of October’ (in The Toynbee Convector). If you liked those stories, and ‘Homecoming’ in particular, you will like this book, which magnifies the idea of the reunion of this otherworldly family and gives us a brief look at their last days — for the Elliotts are coming into conflict with the modern world, a world that no longer believes in the things that go bump in the night.

What is new in From the Dust Returned is both rewritten and expanded sections for each story (for example this version of ‘Uncle Einar’ has him purposefully seeking a wife, rather than accidentally happening upon one) as well as additional vignettes and shorts that round out the whole family and tell of their ultimate fate. Timothy, the normal lad who is the central character of ‘Homecoming’ and has had trouble adjusting to life with a family of immortal — and possibly vampiric — eccentrics, occupies the role of family historian, and is our anchor amidst this strange family of shape changers, Egyptian mummies, ghosts, and coffin-sleepers.

Bradbury’s light touch is still there, and this strange family is ever more human than it is monstrous, and the qualities that ensured ‘Homecoming’ was rejected from Weird Tales in the forties are the guiding principles of this novel of 2001– namely, this is a story about human relationships, family, and the passage of time, not ghouls and goblins. Thus we have a tale in which four randy and adventurous young men have their souls trapped in the body of their ancient grandfather, only to find his lifetime’s memories are adventure enough to satisfy their every craving; a story in which a sick passenger on the Orient Express is discovered to be suffering from an ailment of the modern world, for his kind is not longer believed in; and another of a man who feels trapped by his family only to find in them the source of his own redemption. As always, Bradbury’s stories are human stories, and From the Dust Returned features some of his most lyrical invocations and elegiac imagery to create the sort of dark fantastic fiction that prizes the somber and the beautiful over the shrill and shocking.

• From the Dust Returned at Amazon
• Ray Bradbury’s website

A carnival should be all growls, roars like timberlands stacked, bundled, rolled and crashed, great explosions of lion dust, men ablaze with working anger, pop bottles jangling, horse buckles shivering, engines and elephants in full stampede through rains of sweat while zebras neighed and trembled like cage trapped in cage.

But this was like old movies, the silent theater haunted with black-and-white ghosts, silvery mouths opening to let moonlight smoke out, gestures made in silence so hushed you could feel the wind fizz the hair on your cheeks.

• Title: Something Wicked This Way Comes
• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Genre: Horror/Fantasy
• Year: 1962

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the quintessential Ray Bradbury novel, one that combines the many threads and themes of his lifelong work in a book that is equal parts weird tale, small town reminiscence, and celebration of life. It stands alongside The October Country as the purest expression of Bradbury’s brand of horror-fantasy, something that combines the supernatural with real and relatable human fears, inflected with an autumnal style that blends exuberance with bittersweet nostalgia.

This is a novel about growing up, and growing old, but ultimately about seizing hold of the life you have and living it. Best friends Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade are boys on the cusp of adulthood in the small town of Green Town, Illinois, and their ordinary world of boyhood adventures and philosophies is drawn with a familiarity and enthusiasm by Bradbury that rivals the best coming-of-age novels. So too does Bradbury take pains to distinguish his two protagonists, Will the innocent and Jim the world-hungry, and their different personas determine the way they experience the sinister and seductive carnival that steals into town one October night.

Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show is the dark carnival that menaces our protagonists. Rolling into town in the dead of night on a black train whistling a funeral dirge — an event witnessed by Will and Jim — from the start it’s clear that this circus is no ordinary troupe of entertainers. Will and Jim soon stumble upon the Shadow Show’s dark secrets, and come to be hunted by Messieurs Cooger and Dark over the course of the novel.

Like any carnival, the Shadow Show deals in illusions and promises, but with a difference. Much of the best and most evocative writing of the novel occurs as the people of Green Town feel the temptations awaiting them out in the fairgrounds. For Will’s father this is especially true, a man who feels he has grown old and allowed to much of life to slip him by, and would like nothing more than to go back and revisit his youth. Which is exactly what the Shadow Show offers, a chance to go back.

But for Jim, seduced by the promises of the grown-up world whereas Will remains untouched, the temptation is to be an adult, to stop having to wait for the things he wants to experience. Something as innocent as a Merry-Go-Round becomes the instrument of these promises of youth or maturity, false promises that only curse the recipient and fuel Cooger and Dark’s huger for suffering and sorrow. Bradbury’s imagistic and unexpected prose paints a picture of a carnival gone rotten at its core, where the simple fun of the Mirror Maze can become a trap, and the freaks of the freakshow are not people born with an affliction, but those enslaved and twisted by the dark power of the carnival.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a quick but memorable read, and really shows Bradbury’s talents for the concrete realities of small town life and the thrills and pitfalls of growing up. The scares here come out of human temptation, of the willingness of people to become what they are not and leave what they love behind to satisfy their own lingering unhappiness or unfulfilled dreams. Combine this with great atmosphere and a host of strange characters, and you have perfect October reading.

• Something Wicked This Way Comes at Amazon
• Ray Bradbury’s website

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. In dark clock-springs of hair, Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, acorn-husk, hair of squirrel, feather of departed robin, sawdust from fresh-cut cordwood, and leaves like charcoals shaken from a blaze of maple trees. Dog jumped. Showers of brittle fern, blackberry vine, marsh-grass sprang over the bed where Martin shouted. No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!

• Title: The October Country
• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Genre: Horror/Fantasy
• Year: 1955

Ray Bradbury’s importance to the literature of the 20th century extends beyond the limits of genre to embrace all of fiction, and to our broader culture itself. Justly renowned for titles like Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Illustrated Man, Bradbury has been a distinct, and distinctly American, voice in speculative fiction for over half a century. It’s a shame he isn’t as widely read as he is admired, or that so many people forget just how sophisticated, how varied, and how spectacular a writer he really is having, perhaps, read a book or story or two of his in junior high English and assumed he was just one of those boring old writers that were a perennial favorite of school teachers and fusty librarians.

Well, Bradbury is anything but boring — unless you think an infant murderer, a man at war with his own skeleton, or a dog that brings the dead to visit a bed-ridden boy sound like the ideas behind  boring stories. Those are just a few of the strange imaginings at work in The October Country, a classic collection of fantastical horror that collects much of Bradbury’s early work from magazines such as Weird Tales, and from a prior anthology Dark Carnival. It is a horror collection but, above all, it is a Bradbury collection, and his distinct voice permeates all and ensures that these tales are more about evoking a certain mood than dwelling on the horrific or sensational.  As to what that mood is, Bradbury says it best in his opening statement: The October Country is “that country where it is always turning late in the year, that country whose people are always autumn people, thinking autumn thoughts.”

The stories in this collection are palpably autumnal, and take place at the juncture of summer’s sweet recall and winter’s approach. Death is near, even in the midst of wonder, even in the celebration of life. ‘The Emissary,’ quoted at the opening of this review, is the perfect example of this. Rich in autumnal imagery, poetically October, it tells of the small pleasures of a sick and housebound boy, whose experience  of the world outside comes from the vicarious romping of his dog. An empathetic tale of a lonely child, one who still manages to find the joys in his childhood. But death is there, uncaring of the boy’s need, and intrudes on the boy’s life through his loyal and well-meaning emissary.

The stories in The October Country are both creepy and poignant, and highlight Bradbury’s strength of juxtaposing the mundane of everyday humanity with the weird and unexpected. Thus we have ‘The Crowd,’ a spooky tale based on the observation of how rapidly a crowd forms at the site of an accident, ‘The Small Assassin’ in which a new mother dislikes the baby she believes wants to kill her, and ‘The Jar,’ which gives us a man willing to kill to protect the only thing that gives him any significance — the mystery of the contents of a jar purchased from a carnival. There are horror tales here, like ‘The Wind’ and ‘Skeleton,’ but also tales of loss and fear and weird transformation.

‘Uncle Einar,’ the story of a winged man who can no longer soar on the night wind as he once did, and feels tethered to his earthly family, is a wonderful example of a tale that isn’t horrific in any way, yet fits as snugly alongside the stories in this collection as any other. Einar, brooding over his loss of vitality and the abandonment of his independence, comes to find salvation in the very family that he felt had tied him to the earth. In ‘The Dwarf,’ a small and misshapen man frequents a carnival in the slow hours of the night to see his reflection made tall and straight in the funhouse mirrors there. Two sets of very human reactions collide in his wake — his private fantasies inevitably the fodder for others because of his conspicuous vulnerability.

Bradbury handles language with his own distinctive rhythm, equal parts colloquial Americana and high poetry. His words pop off the page, crisp and unexpected and perfectly placed. This textual pyrotechnics is best seen in his short fiction — for which he is primarily known — and The October Country is perhaps one of his strongest collections in terms of linguistic and thematic richness. Bradbury’s language frolics, it frissons, it fulminates — it can make you bark laughter, blear eye, or drop jaw amazed and not a little bit awe-struck. Like all the best writing, it is akin to nothing else, the inhabiter of its own universe. It is a universe where readers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction can find a home — perhaps even in that part of it called The October Country.

• The October Country at Amazon
• Ray Bradbury’s website

October 23: Up in the morning, out on the job. I hassled the Things, then checked around outside. A black feather lay near our front door. Could be one of Nightwind’s. Could be openers on a nasty spell. Could just be a stray feather. I carried it across the road to the field and pissed on it.

• Title: A Night in the Lonesome October
• Author: Roger Zelazny
• Genre: Horror/Fantasy
• Year: 1993

Roger Zelazny never ceases to amaze me. Ballsy and inventive in equal amounts, he’s the guy at the party who tells outrageous lies with a straight face, and builds elaborately upon them all evening until you believe him — not because he’s convinced you, no, but because he’s bullshitted with such seductive skill that you’re dying to be a part of his own version of the truth. If another writer has come along with his mix of headlong, impetuous storytelling, precise humor and lean prose, and staggering imagination than somebody please tell me, because a book like A Night in the Lonesome October reminds me just how much I miss this guy.

Simply told but never simplistic, Lonesome October is narrated by Snuff, a watchdog for one of the Players in a Game of metaphysical and multidimensional proportions. Soho, on the outskirts of London, sometime before the death of the nineteenth century, has drawn a disparate group for the playing of this age-old Game. Many of these Players are lifted straight from horror fiction of the past, or even history itself, and such figures as the Count, the Mad Monk, the Good Doctor, and the Great Detective are readily identifiable even though Zelazny never uses their proper names. Snuff’s master, Jack, is a Londoner who’s good with a knife and keeps late hours . . . like nearly all of the Players it’s immediately obvious just who he is, and such a collection of oddities and archetypes is handled cleverly and in a manner consistent with the reader’s expectations (fans of the ‘Great Detective,’ in particular, should really get a kick out of his facility with disguise here).

But the book isn’t about Jack, and whatever real horrors might be conjured up by such a character are kept at arm’s length by focusing on the Players’ familiars for much of the story. Zelazny’s quirky choice gives Lonesome October almost the feel of a beast fable, as Snuff spies on, thwarts, or assists the various animal familiars all out doing the same for their masters. Much of the action at the beginning of the book is a double mystery, for Snuff is concerned with identifying the other Players and trying to determine just what side they are on, and the reader is gradually given clues as to what exactly this Game of magic and maneuver is all about. This unfolding of information and wheeling and dealing among the animals is a great deal of fun, a bit like a combination of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold with Watership Down and a Karloff-Lugosi double feature on late night cable.

The importance of the Game is revealed as Snuff works out the various Geometries that govern how and where it’s final act will be played out. On the way we are treated to black humor and black magic, such as one scene in a cemetery — in which many of the Players are busy robbing graves for spell components — that turns into a farcical swap-meet, or when Snuff gives advice about coping with hangovers to a snake that lives in the belly of the often-drunk Mad Monk. Things get a bit grimmer as Players start dying and friends find themselves on opposite sides, and it all builds deftly to a satisfying conclusion on October 31st — the night of a full moon.

Fans of Stoker, Shelley, Lovecraft, Conan Doyle, and classic horror will find a lot to grin about in Lonesome October. I suspect in the hands of a lesser author this book would have been an uneven mess, but Zelazny’s brisk confidence and light touch keep the story on course between the two extremes of ghastliness and lunacy in such a way that the reader believes every word and comes to care about the characters.

The edition I read was illustrated by Gahan Wilson, famed for his demented cartoons in SF circles (and beyond). His illustrations in Lonesome October, which is what I’d imagine newspaper comic strips in the underworld to look like, are a perfect accompaniment to the tone of the story and really enhance the tale.

• A Night in the Lonesome October on Amazon
• A Roger Zelazny fan site