The October Country: Stories

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A very funny story about a girl who refused to die and became an old women who will fight death with whatever she has!

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. Writes just enough pulp detective stories to live. I found one of his stories in the secondhand magazine place, and, Ralph, guess what? Ray Bradbury has never confined his vision to the purely literary. He has been nominated for an Academy Award (for his animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright), and has won an Emmy Award (for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree). He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the creative consultant on the United States Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. In 1982 he created the interior metaphors for the Spaceship Earth display at Epcot Center, Disney World, and later contributed to the conception of the Orbitron space ride at Euro-Disney, France. The Cistern", slight but poetic, is more about evoking Ophelia-like images of drowned bodies and flowers deep underground than telling a full story. 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.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.

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. Maybe because ideas come slow because he’s down in the dumps. Who wouldn’t be? So small that way? I bet it’s hard to think of anything except being so small and living in a one-room cheap apartment. As for my childhood: my parents were small people, not quite dwarfs, not quite. My father’s inheritance kept us in a doll’s house, an amazing thing like a white-scrolled wedding cake—little rooms, little chairs, miniature paintings, cameos, ambers with insects caught inside, everything tiny, tiny, tiny! The world of Giants far away, an ugly rumor beyond the garden wall. Poor mama, papa! They meant only the best for me. They kept me, like a porcelain vase, small and treasured, to themselves, in our ant world, our beehive rooms, our microscopic library, our land of beetle-sized doors and moth windows. Only now do I see the magnificent size of my parents’ psychosis! They must have dreamed they would live forever, keeping me like a butterfly under glass. But first father died, and then fire ate up the little house, the wasp’s nest, and every postage-stamp mirror and saltcellar closet within. Mama, too, gone! And myself alone, watching the fallen embers, tossed out into a world of Monsters and Titans, caught in a landslide of reality, rushed, rolled, and smashed to the bottom of the cliff! 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.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. 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 turn colors 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. Uncle Einar” and “Homecoming” are the two stories later used to put together From the Dust Returned, and describes an Addams Family like clan. 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.