The October Country: Stories

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Many of the stories deal with death—its certainty and the ways people react to this certainty. In “The Scythe,” a poor farmer inherits the job of Grim Reaper. Each day he must harvest blades of wheat that represent those scheduled to die. He tries to spare his family, but they are trapped between life and death. In his attempt to free them, he slashes wildly and indiscriminately at the wheat, thus beginning World War II. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone: A most remarkable case of murder—the deceased was delighted . . . 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. 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:

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" - Strange mainstream-ish story. It is actually quite wonderful, a great way to end the book. This collection of stories is no different. The words used and the worlds created are impeccable. Unfortunately... with a rare few of these stories... the pathways running through those beautiful worlds are... kinda dumb. And every one of them ends abruptly. Which can work for some of the stories but is a little jarring for the others. 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. The Small Assassin: A fine, healthy baby boy was the new mother's dream come true--or her worst nightmare . . . 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.The Small Assassin" - My favorite story in this book, give me the collywobbles! I'm not saying anything about the plot! 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). 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.” 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 Once in a lifetime anyway, it’s nice to make a mistake if you think it’ll do somebody some good, she said.

The Jar:A chilling story that combines love, death . . . and a matter of identity in a bottle of fear.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. 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... Another story that Bradbury carried over from Dark Carnival to The October Country was a lightly revised version of “The Lake,” which he had written in 1942, at the age of twenty-two. “The Lake” was a significant breakthrough for the writer early in his career. “I realized I had at last written a really fine story,” Bradbury wrote in his 1989 book, Zen in the Art of Writing. “The first in ten years of writing. And not only was it a fine story, but it was some sort of hybrid, something verging on the new. Not a traditional ghost story at all, but a story about love, time, remembrance, and drowning.” She held up the magazine. I’ll read you part of his crime story. It’s got all the guns and tough people, but it’s told by a dwarf. I bet the editors never guessed the author knew what he was writing about. Oh, please don’t sit there like that, Ralph! Listen. The Jar: A chilling story that combines love, death . . . and a matter of identity in a bottle of fear.