The October Country by Joe
Mugnaini
Read And Reread
Ray Bradburys first short story collection is back in print, its chilling
encounters with funhouse mirrors, parasitic accident-watchers, and
strange poker chips intact. Both sides of Bradburys vaunted childhood
nostalgia are also on display, in the celebratory Uncle Einar, and haunting
The Lake, the latter a fine elegy to childhood loss. This edition features a
new introduction by Bradbury, an invaluable essay on writing, wherein the
author tells of his Theater of Morning Voices, and, by inference,
encourages you to listen to the same murmurings in yourself. And has any
writer anywhere ever made such good use of exclamation marks!?
Personal Review: The October Country by Joe Mugnaini
Adapted from ISawLightningFall.blogspot.com
Autumn is the season that draws me back to my central-Kentucky
childhood. Back then, the daytime temperature would hover just above

freezing point, the sun a warm disc in the chill blue sky. Leaves would
slowly shift to orange and ochre and brown before cascading down in piles
that reached your knees. The air smelled of cider, and you could always
find pumpkins -- lined for purchase in fields, in stacks at the grocery, by
every front door. Nights were different. The cold came down like a
hammer. It stiffened the leaves into parchment and brittled the grass with
frost. Wind would moan around the eaves like an afflicted spirit. As the
season crawled near to winter, I'd wake to find the water in the horses'
paddocks frozen like a stone. Autumn was a thing of beauty and eeriness,
as is Ray Bradbury's short-story collection The October Country.
Nearly all of the material tilts toward horror, although it's an older kind
that's unafraid to commingle sentiment and scares. Many of the stories are
one-weird-idea tales, throwing an intentional kink in the order of things. In
"The Scythe," a migrant farmer inherits a field of grain from a stranger,
along with a sickle on which is engraved "Who Wields Me -- Wields the
World!" He discovers too late why the wheat ripens in patches, why there's
just enough for him to cut each day, and why it springs up again soon after
he slices it down. "Skeleton" features a nervous hypochondriac whose
bones might be rebelling against him or who may be in thrall to a sinister
physician. Another doctor inadvertently aids "The Small Assassin" -- a
newborn with the facilities of an adult and murder on his mind. A youngster
dispatches a vampire residing in his grandmother's boarding house ("The
Man Upstairs") and a newly married man reconnects with a long-lost love
decades after her drowning ("The Lake").
While the collection contains more than a few spooky tropes, many of the
shorts avoid the supernatural, focusing instead on the dreams and
darknesses within the human heart. There is "The Dwarf" who nightly
ventures through a circus hall of mirrors to watch his reflection stretch and
elongate. A lonely Louisiana bumpkin becomes the center of small-town
life when brings home "The Jar," in which floats a shrunken, pickled thing
that might have once been human. Both light-hearted and gruesome, "The
Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" finds a boorish fellow becoming the
cynosure of an avart-garde movement. When his admirers' interest begins
to slacken, he decides to make his body into a work of art. Two retired life-
insurance salesmen try to save future murderees from self-destruction
("Touched With Fire").
Not all of the stories work. There are plots that fail to gain traction ("The
Next in Line") and characters flatter than the paper they're printed on ("The
Cistern"). Interesting conceits get sidelined by swathes of expository
dialogue ("The Wind"). The cheery tone and gushing prose of the final
story, "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone," clashes with the others. But
these are minor quibbles. Over fifty years after its original publication, The
October Country can still chill, whether it's autumn or high summer.
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