The October Country

The October Country is a collection of Bradbury stories written in the 1940s and early 1950s and all bear his trademark macabre sensibility. These are beautifully written tales of creeping dread, fantastical in nature and yet rooted in the smalltown America that became Bradbury's favourite setting.

It's not that Bradbury sets out to scare the living daylights out of you, more that he takes an everyday, mundane situation (a newborn baby; a lodger; a family celebrating Hallowe'en) and twists it ever so slightly to make us think “what if..?”

The longest story here is set in Mexico, where a couple visit a cemetery to find that those who cannot keep up payments on the graves have their relatives disinterred and stored in a mausoleum, lined up against the walls like so many hideous shop mannequins. The building hysteria of the wife in the story is wonderfully done.

Other stories deal with loss and death too, of loneliness and the sense that there are forces at work in the world of which we know very little. Some of his prose is very evocative and you can see him growing towards the great novels he would write, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and what should have been the title story for this collection, but metamorphosed into Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Bradbury was one of America's great writers in a career that spanned decades. You'd do well to read this, just not alone, on a dark and stormy night....

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.