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.
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