The October Country
1955 • 334 pages
Ratings13
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings13
Average rating3.9
The October Country is many places: a picturesque Mexican village where death is a tourist attraction; a city beneath the city where drowned lovers are silently reunited; a carnival midway where a tiny man’s most cherished fantasy can be fulfilled night after night. Each of the stories in Ray Bradbury’s masterful collection is a wonder, imagined by an acclaimed tale-teller writing from a place of shadows. But there is astonishing beauty here as well, born from a prose that enchants and enthralls, that chills like a long-after-midnight wind, that lifts the reader high above a sleeping Earth on strange wings. In The October Country, there is no escaping the dark stranger who lives upstairs . . . or the reaper who wields the world.
Reviews with the most likes.
Mr. Bradbury was very kind in that to make up for the the unsettled mood he's put you in for the first half of the book, the last few stories are much more comforting and end on sweeter and more pleasant notes.
A brilliant collection of stories centered around what Bradbury called his “autumn people.” Of course, anything by Ray Bradbury is going to be high caliber, but these stories speak to me at the heart. Much like “Something Wicked” the stories focus on worlds very similar to ours, but always a little off.
Bradbury is at his best in short stories and every one in this collection doesn't disappoint. If you like the man at his most eerie, weird, disaffected and dark, this is essential reading.
Worlds of funhouses, quack doctors, catacombs, corpses, skeletons, ancient houses, all tied together by a lonesome, empty street, small town feel. Bradbury, while in some stories all but glorifies the small town, in this collection we see the darkest side the master could conjure up about such places.
It's Ray Bradbury's short stories so of course, they're going to be good. One of my favorite short story writers, no question.
In this collection, I see a theme of characters who become obsessed or deeply neurotic about events/things that lead them into situations they may (or may not) have avoided. A few examples of this are “The Next in Line,” “The Crowd,” and “The Wind.”
The description calls these “macabre” stories and perhaps they are, but I found humor in some of them too, “Skeleton,” “There Was an Old Woman,” and “Homecoming” in particular. It could just be me; it has occurred to me that I have a weird sense of humor.
“Homecoming” was one of my particular favorites, like The Munsters if Marylin had been less well-adjusted.
Fun collection and my favorite Halloween read this year.
A nice little collection of short stories. I really like Bradbury's use of language.
I think the stories I liked best from this one were: The Next in Line, The Lake, The Emissary, Jack-in-the-Box, The Wind, There Was an Old Woman, and The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone.
