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....