RAY BRADBURY READALONG: The October Country

Welcome, welcome! Following is the rough reading schedule for the Bradbury readalong of The October Country. The tentative plan is to read two or three short stories from the collection each week, wrapping up, appropriately enough, on Halloween week. The first two weeks depart from that schedule, with one story apiece. “The Dwarf” will let us ease into Bradbury’s world and will give latecomers the chance to catch up. And it’s followed by "The Next in Line", the longest story in the collection. Most weeks (except for the kickoff week) have about the same page count.

Obviously, there are no Reading Cops. If you want to enjoy the entire book in one gulp, have at it. If you find one story particularly disturbing, you might want to flip through the collection and find something a little lighter for your next attempt. But it might be helpful to keep the general discussion focused on either “this week’s” or "last week's" stories, to avoid spoilers for those who are encountering these tales for the first time.

Okay – let’s read!

Sept. 1: "The Dwarf"
Sept. 8: "The Next in Line"
Sept. 15: "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse", "The Skeleton"
Sept/ 22: "The Jar", "The Lake", "The Emissary"
Sept. 29: "Touched with Fire", "The Small Assassin"
Oct. 6: "The Crowd", "Jack-in-the-Box"
Oct. 13: "The Scythe", "Uncle Einar", "The Wind"
Oct. 20: "The Man Upstairs", "There Was an Old Woman"
Oct. 27: "The Cistern", "Homecoming", "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone"

perfect! just got my copy, read the very interesting author preface, and am ready to go!

>1 LyndaInOregon: Thanks for setting up the thread.

I just noticed that one of the stories is called “Uncle Einar” - I have an uncle Einar! (Or had, he died a long time ago.) Looking forward (or maybe not) to seeing what that story is about.

Ready to go - my copy arrived on Wednesday.

My copy is still on the way, but I will be keeping up digitally until it arrives!

I'll be joining digitally.

I’ve got a digital copy from hoopla, and I’m ready to start!

the old fashioned paperback from my local indi

Still waiting for my copy to arrive ordered from my local bookstore. All copies (all 2!) are checked out from my city library. Does anyone know where I might be able to access a PDF in the meantime?

My copy arrived just in time, I'll start tomorrow.

Great! Just checking in. Will start "The Dwarf" tomorrow!

>9 Neil_Luvs_Books: free pdf: https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/B/Bradbury%20-%20The%20October%20...

My copy is en route but I look forward to participating. (I'm not familiar with this particular collection of Bradbury stories..)

Well, I finished the first week’s reading! I had nothing to do for a while at work (was waiting for a colleague) so started reading online.

I'm here. I'm going to do the audio version. I know I read this as a teenager, but I have to admit those titles aren't ringing any bells.

Editing to add that I listened to the first story, and I did actually remember much of it, but not how it ended.

I finished 'The Dwarf' last night. Short and dark.

>16 Karlstar: Pun intended?

Yes, very dark. Is there a spoiler thread somewhere? I want to talk about this one.

>3 PawsforThought: Uncle Einar is an interesting character, I hope you enjoy that one. There is another volume specifically about The Family - From The Dust Returned.

>17 clamairy: Create one & provide a link!

>17 clamairy: Yes ma'am, it was.

The Dwarf seemed like it should be an episode on The Outer Limits of 1960's fame. Actually sorry I wasted my time on this one! Meh

I thought it was good bur not his best by any means. I was surprised that he ignored Chekovs directive about guns

GENERAL QUESTIONS re "The Dwarf"

Is this your first reading of this story? If not, do you remember what you thought of it the first time, and how does that compare to your impression of the re-read?

Bradbury's characterization of female characters was not his strong suit. How does Aimee compare to some of his other women characters?

Is there a particular line (or lines) in the story that particularly resonate with you?

>23 LyndaInOregon: This is the first time I’ve read this story, as far as I can remember.

I think Bradbury excels at boys. All the characters in “The Dwarf” were a little pat, Aimee no worse than Ralph. And as for the writing, it seemed a little overwritten to me—nothing particularly resonant comes to mind.

As far as seeming like an episode of Outer Limits, as >21 Tess_W: mentioned, a lot of Bradbury’s short fiction strikes me that way. But I loved the Outer Limits. In fact, one episode I saw as a kid that has stuck with me for years was based on “The Jar,” later in this collection.

The Dwarf was new to me. While I don't know that any Bradbury passes the Bechdel test, I did appreciate that Aimee had goals and feelings, and expressed justified negative emotions towards a male character. Bit sad that that's a win, though.

I'm impressed that Bradbury, in his day and age, presented a dwarf more like a real and complex person — accomplished writer, human reactions to negative events, spectrum of emotions — when for years a dwarf has mostly been either the butt of a joke or the horror itself.

I am also a little frustrated with the unknown fate of the gun!

>12 Tess_W: Thank you! My copy doesn't arrive until the end of the month so this will do in the meantime. I cannot find Bradbury titles in any of my local used bookstores and the regular retail bookshops don't carry physical copies - you have to order. Apparently, Ray Bradbury titles are collectibles now!

>23 LyndaInOregon: This is my first reading of this story.
I'm not familiar with Bradbury's other work to compare this characterization. I found Aimee relatively one sided, but it was a pretty short story.

>24 Charon07: I did like the Outer Limits as a kid, but seeing a few reruns in the past few years, they seemed to lose my interest.

Just finished reading The Dwarf. So this was 1st published in 1954. I found it interesting how Bradbury included the sexist overtures of Ralph toward Aimee. Clearly, Bradbury was unimpressed with this sort of treatment of women. Which surprises me for this very sexist period of time when it was written (the 50s). Even though the story does not pass the Bechdel Test it still strikes me that Bradbury may have been progressive for his time. Is that true?

>29 Neil_Luvs_Books: I really don't know enough about Bradbury's personal philosophies to weigh in on whether he was "progressive for his time" ... but a 21st-century re-read of Fahrenheit 451 has stunning images of people being "plugged in" more or less constantly to something an awful lot like the internet. They wear earpieces (think Bluetooth), attend parties where instead of talking to each other they all stand around and watch the huge interactive wall screen, and somewhere in the text (I don't have time to chase it down right now), he talks about the notion that the people in his society are constantly inundated with information but are never given the time to think about the content.

That is scarily prescient. It may actually outweigh the book-burning aspects that initially brought the work the public attention.

>29 Neil_Luvs_Books: Ralph certainly comes off as the jerk, yet I can't help notice that Aimee blames herself, more than Ralph for his cruelty.

I'm sure the mirrors play an important part, maybe of a symbol in the story, but I'm not sure what?

>31 ChrisG1: That’s an interesting point, that Aimee blames herself more than Ralph.

I wonder if The October Country will pick up on this theme in later stories? I think I read that Bradbury lightly edited these stories for this collection. Maybe he tried to tie them in closer to each other? I hope so - I like those sort of short story collections.

>31 ChrisG1: & >33 Neil_Luvs_Books: I wanted to talk about this, too! I was amazed that she thought this was her fault, because her kindness towards the little person (Dwarves belong in Middle Earth) triggered Ralph's jealousy.

My heart sank when I read that. But it didnt surprise me, even today women often will accept fault. back then it was just expected.

I still want to know what happen with the gun. Are we to assume that he shot someone? or did I miss something

>29 Neil_Luvs_Books: I don’t believe he was particularly progressive, but some influence can probably be found in the fact that he seems to have been very devoted to his wife (only romantic relationship he ever had and they were together until her death, about a decade before his own. They also had four daughters and no sons so his whole family was women. I’d wager that had an effect on how he portrayed female characters.

>36 PawsforThought: Thanks for that biographical info. That helps explain somewhat Bradbury’s POV. My sense from reading other works by him is that he is sympathetic to the marginalized but firmly in the real world such that his stories don’t always turn out well for the underdog.

>35 cindydavid4: I’m hoping the gun shows up in a later story.

Week of September 8

This week's suggested read is "The Next In Line". This is the longest story in the collection, so it gets a week all its own.

Do we want to open discussions of last week's read ("The Dwarf") to spoilers at this point, or continue to conceal them?

>38 LyndaInOregon: I vote to open for spoilers. I think many of us would like to talk about the gun.

I started listening to 'The Next in Line' yesterday, and stopped when it got later in the day because it was starting to get creepy and I didn't want it stuck in my head at bedtime. I finished it earlier today. I have no memory of this one, and I am not sure why because it was terrifying. Perhaps I just couldn't relate to it when I was 16. Joseph was a bit of a jerk, even though it was possible that Marie was overreacting a bit to being trapped in town by the malfunctioning car (plus the traumatic visit to the catacombs,) as it turns out she was not... And he left her body there! :(

I also finished 'The Next in Line'. I was struck by the sad and disconnected relationshp, which I think directly led to her death by terror. What a sad and horrifying story.

>36 PawsforThought: I don’t believe he was particularly progressive

For the time period, he was, but yeah his family probably effected his female characters

>42 cindydavid4: Maybe in his younger years, but he switched politically in the 70s/80s. I would never call someone who refers to Reagan as (I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact quote) “greatest president ever” a progressive.

>41 Karlstar: Yes. I found myself wondering if that disconnect only became apparent because they were so far away from their normal routines and surroundings.

Although I haven't read this particular story before, this is how I remember Bradbury. Marie is described as "ridiculous," her body "beyond saving," her husband calls her "good girl." How very demeaning. The men in the story view her as overreacting, childishly paranoid, and simple, and although she was ultimately correct in all her fears, the narrative seems to afford her little sympathy for the fact.

This isn't to say I didn't enjoy the story. From the moment Marie hears the screams in the catacombs, I was certain of the ending, but that didn't assuage the mounting dread as the narrative marched unerring towards her terrible fate.

I was surprised by Bradbury's keen sense of the uncanny valley (all that is human has been scraped from the bones, so they hold no terror) so much earlier than I remember the term entering the zeitgeist, but then again, as such a masterful writer of horror, I suppose it was an effect he had a mastery of anyway, even if he hadn't heard the phrase "uncanny valley" before.

Although, to that point, I remember being terrified of skeletons at a young age, until such a time that I learned there was a skeleton inside me at all times... my terror briefly reached an absolute peak until I could develop an acceptance of such a fact, and then I had no need for fear. A skeleton couldn't get me, for I was a skeleton, with the added benefit of muscles and tendons, and a brain to command them all!

As an adult, I have no fear of mummies or of becoming one. If I could guarantee such a result, I would love nothing more than to be preserved as a fossil or mummy that future scientists could study and marvel at! What terrifies me, is the idea of being in a relationship with someone who clearly holds such disdain for me, and would be willing to leave my remains behind, not just in a tiny town they likely have no intention to returning to, but in a tiny town in a foreign country surrounded by no one who knows me, cares about me, or for the most part even speaks my language. Whenever my time comes, I hope I am surrounded by those who hold love for me and will miss me and remember where exactly it is I am ultimately laid to rest.

>45 GraceCollection: Wait till next week -- one of the stories is "The Skeleton". May take you right back to that childhood terror! (It's in her spoiler, for those who didn't peek.)

I think I was about 13 when I read The October Country. "The Next in Line" was my first exposure to El Dia de Muerte, and I found it incredibly macabre -- especially the candy skulls (with names on them, yet!). Now, I live in a community that is about half Hispanic, I'm very far from 13, and the celebration seems a unique way to commemorate loved ones who are gone from this life but not from our hearts. I still would probably pass on viewing los momias, however.

I still find the story very unsettling, particularly the description of the walk through the catacombs. Bradbury really gets rolling here with one of his signature stylistic tropes as he relentlessly piles image upon image upon image in long paragraphs packed with so many impressions and ideas that the brain can't process the first before the second and third and fourth and fifth assault the senses.

One thing I did notice this time -- and I don't consider this a spoiler -- was the notion of moisture somehow being tied to decay in the human body. Joseph (who is a real pig, IMHO) looks at his wife's no-longer-young body and compares it to "clay ... carelessly impregnated with water ... impossible to shape again", then admires los momias, who in death have achieve a kind of purity with the departure of that water.

I'm a member of the Gothic Literature and The Weird Tradition groups. An invitation to join this readalong went to at least one of those groups. I didn't respond because I wasn't sure if I would have the free time due to work commitments. However, so far I have been able to reread "The Dwarf". As I haven't seen any decision regarding spoilers, I'll hide what I have to say about the story:

First off, just to put it in context,The October Country is a heavily revised version of Ray Bradbury's first book, a short story collection called Dark Carnival. A number of stories were dropped and replaced with new ones, while many of the remaining stories were rewritten. This brings the collection into line with the more mainstream or even literary reputation that Bradbury was gaining by the 1950s.

"The Dwarf" was new to this collection (although I presume it had a prior magazine publication, as it was copyrighted 1953 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, according to the information in my copy of The October Country). As it's new, and opens what, in 1955, was Bradbury's only in-print book of horror and other "dark fiction" stories, it's seems fair to take it as a statement of intent: this is how, as a mature writer, I do horror.

A big part of Bradbury's literary reputation depended on his, I guess, empathy: being able to look into the workings of the human heart and present them in his signature metaphor-heavy, florid prose.

Fashions change though. I've started rereading Bradbury in the past few years, and have come across some wince-inducing pronouncements. On race, the relations between men and women, and so on.

This story turns on one of them, and also on the question of how far authors are entitled (I won't say allowed) to imagine themselves into other people's life experiences. Because even if I didn't know that in interviews Bradbury had always proclaimed his identifiction with "the misunderstood monster" - Karloff's Frankenstein's monster and so on - I think it's clear that he is Mr Bigelow (certainly the man's prose style is the same as Bradbury's!), that he's imagining how he would feel if he had been born with dwarfism, and that's something which a lot of people would now consider problematic.

Part of this is that it plays into the idea that the physical appearance mirrors the inner personality, so ugly person = evil or horrible person. It's only in the past 25 years or so that disabled and physically disfigured people have been seen regularly in the media and portrayed as "normal". Given that, I think that we can allow that the story was touching on some deep-rooted and unpleasant human traits (which is often the very thing that makes good horror effective). But when society manages to work away at those traits, the fiction that used them can end up as not so effective, and very possibly misunderstood by later readers. The ending of the story might be a case in point, (see below).

Of course Mr Bigelow's self-loathing and shunning of other people is exacerbated by the behavour of people like Ralph which was sadly pretty much still the norm in the 1950s.

The representation of Aimee and Ralph, and their relationship is not "progressive" but I think it probably is true for a lot of relationships (maybe even more so at that time). Aimee blames herself for what happens partly because she "provoked" Ralph - obviously that's not true, we would rightly say that it was entirely on him. But I think under the surface Bradbury has shown that Aimee is rather naïve and perhaps would have been better to have left well alone after all, whilst Ralph, although revealed as a very unpleasant person, does have a shrewder (if ungenerous) understanding of human nature.

What about the gun? I didn't think there was much doubt about that. Bigelow in despair, has taken it and will probably do away with himself if he isn't found in time. I don't think we are supposed to think he's turn his anger outwards (despite the title of the story Aimee reads) for a handful of reasons: would people be so eager to look for him if they thought that they were in danger? were mass shootings really covered in fiction this early (the earliest I can think of, off the top of my head, in any media, is the film Targets;I think it would of detracted from Bradbury's intention to keep Mr Bigelow as a sympathetic character.

Sympathetic but not wholly three-dimensional, and not in the end the focus of the story. In the last few paragraphs we are back with Ralph and Aimee alone. Aimee sees Ralph's reflection in a distorting mirror. In it, he is squashed into the resemblance of a dwarf himself. She walks and then starts to run away.

The irony here is that the distorting mirrors were showing both Ralph and Mr Bigelow as they are "on the inside" and now Aimee is seeing just how ugly (on the inside) Ralph really is. The problem for a modern reader is that for this to work with any kind of shocked realisation, for the ending to have any punch, they have to have an unconcious bias that "ugly on the outside" (should) = "ugly on the inside" which the ending turns on its head.VVV

>48 housefulofpaper: welcome, and thanks for your comments, I appreciated the context of the dwarf in the book and between the former book. I also had some issues esp relating to women in his books that I didnt notice on first or second reads. such as poor Marie

The dwarf story reminds me of dork of corkabout a. It’s about a dwarf who grows to manhood and publishes a book, called Nightstalk, based on his observations of the stars and of
Frankie’s journey to find acceptance and love, a journey that mr bigelow had perhaps longed for but his treatment by those around him kept him from thinkig it was posible

Interesting "Bradbury had always proclaimed his identifiction with "the misunderstood monster" - Karloff's Frankenstein's monster and so on - I think it's clear that he is Mr Bigelow (certainly the man's prose style is the same as Bradbury's!), that he's imagining how he would feel if he had been born with dwarfism, and that's something which a lot of people would now consider problematic."

>45 GraceCollection: Marie was certainly a classic "beaten down" spouse. Her husband had no respect for her & saw her as a burden. Which created the condition for the premise - that he was using that town & the graveyard as a useful way to rid himself of her. I was slow to figure out what was going on - really, it was only the ending that brought it all home for me, and I'd say that's a compliment to Bradbury's skill with a spooky story.

Skeletons scared me as a kid, as well. I think it's because they represent death, so if animated, it is death coming for you. Small wonder the Grim Reaper is depicted as a skeleton. Mummies are a similar phenomenon.

Re: “The Next in Line”

I found most of this story rather tedious. The visit to the catacomb was horrific—the screaming will probably haunt me for some time. But it was downhill from there. >51 ChrisG1:’s observation that Joseph had it in for Marie from the beginning was lost on me. So much so that I was taken completely aback by his humming and his sheepish smile at the end.

>51 ChrisG1: Thanks for your insight. The story makes more sense to me now. I thought that Joseph was just being dense toward Marie - that he was a dense man. But that makes more sense that Joseph kept them in the town on purpose to drive Marie nuts - toward death - to be rid of her. Yeesh! Are there people really like that? Both kinds: people that stay with creeps and people that torment their partners? When I read a story like this and imagine that maybe there are really people like that … I just don’t want to live in that world. But if you are Marie, how do you get out of that world? Maybe she was naive and didn’t realize that her partner was who he was in the end?

This ended up being a good story - repugnant as the premise was. :P

These days I would hope there are less of each, but yes, I have had experience with both groups. Abusive partners often do all they can to isolate you from outside support and make you feel like, even if you wanted to leave, there is no where you could possibly go where people would help or care about you. Cults often do this, too.

It was easier in the 50s, when a woman couldn't even open a bank account on her own. If society doesn't view you as your own person, but just as the property or extension of your husband, how can you ever hope to have a life and support yourself without him?

"are there people really like that? Both kinds: people that stay with creeps and people that torment their partners?"

All over the world. in many places women could be abused physically emotionally and mentally without any recourse esp if they were married. I think how much better we have it now but in reality there are still too many women trapped at home isolated, not realizing there are options or help in woman's shelters. Or if they do find a way out they end up going back because they cant keep themselves or children fed. And are often criticized for it

>51 ChrisG1: Great observation, I had not thought of that angle. Makes much more sense now.

>49 GraceCollection:

Apologies for the delay in replying. Yes, there is some ambiguity in the ending and I was probably too confident in asserting the interpretation that seemed "the right one" to me.

I was still in that lightbulb moment, where my reading seemed to be the most poignant reading (and lined up with the emotions that the mature Bradbury likes to work on), and also tied up with my realisation that Aimee is the real focus of the story.

>57 housefulofpaper: Ah, no apology needed here. Post when you are available. A good thing about this site — no 'push notifications' telling us when to be online!

New week, new story collection. (In hindsight, perhaps we should have started this whole thing on FRIDAY THE 13TH! Oh well, too late now, unless somebody looked at the calendar and decided to modify their personal schedule!)

Stories for this week are:
"The Watchful Poker Chip of Henry Matisse"
"Skeleton"
"The Jar"

This will be our first week with multiple stories. Not sure how that will work in the discussion, but I guess we'll find out!

Spoilers for previous weeks' stories are now optional.

Great discussions so far! Looking forward to what this week brings us.

-Lynda

"The Next in Line"

I'm not coming to any of these stories as an innocent, first time reader, although I have to confess that participating in discussions like this in other groups has already demonstrated how much of my reading I've forgotten over the years. That said, I did read this one fairly recently, and I've read about it, too.

This was actually the final story in the original incarnation of this collection, Dark Carnival, which was certainly ending the book on a dark note. Maybe the rearrangement for The October Country means things will lighten up by the end of this book.

I was checking through Ray Bradbury's bibliography on Wikipedia and saw that this story was published as the text of a book entitled The Mummies of Guanajuato in 1978. Evidently it's an art book with photographs by Archie Lieberman "of the actual mummies discovered in Guanajuato which inspired the story."(quoting Wikipedia). I'd read (and managed to remember!) that this story had been inspired by a real-life visist and seeng the mummies had made a strong impression on Bradbury. In fact he also used the catacombs and the Mexican setting in a crime story that wasn't reprinted until the 1984 paperback original A Memory of Murder (and, as far as I know, not reprinted since).

Thinking about the effect of mummies (and skeletons) on me personally, the footage of the mummies that Werner Herzog used as the opening scene of Nosferatu the Vampyre is one of the most unsettling things I've seen on screen. More unsettling in fact than seeing the mummified Lindow Man, and the naturally mummified predynastic Gebelein mummy, in the British Museum (both of which are unwrapped). My opinion on skeletons used to be that they were, as far as scares were concerned, "kids' stuff" because they (or plastic replicas - perhaps) were used as comedy props on TV shows as much as they were used as scary set dressing. I'm not afraid of them, but I am more mindful these days that they, are, after all, human remains, and were, probably still are, utitised with a lack of due respect to that fact. That feeling of discomfort has an element of the awareness of mortality in it.

This is a long story and it wasn't my first time reading it. I wasn't 100% into reading it, so I did what I usually don't do - i switched from reading to listening. I found what might be the worst version avaliable, an affectless AI version on YouTube. All the same, the rythmns of Bradbury's prose kept me engaged and the long fallout from the visit to the catacombs more than kept my attention. I know it's been said that Bradbury's prose and his dialogue, especially, doesn't translate well to drama, but just being read the story is at least sometimes more effective than reading it to oneself.

After all that, I don't have a lot to add to the discussion about the story itself. I do have to say (taking note of the fact that the ending is ambiguous enough for the reader to infer what's happened, and therefore different readings are valid) I didn't think this was a story of a premeditated murder. There are suggestions of deceipt on Joseph's part but they could equally be indications of Marie's rising feelings of isolation and frustration. Bradbury often tells stories where his protagonist doesn't have full agency and isn't listened to, the protagonist being a child or - as dicussed, this being a representation of mid-20th Century America - a woman. It's a basic tool of writing a suspense story. I did think Joseph was just a "dense" man - a boor, not really interested in his wife, not really seeing her as a person, and only mildly put out by her death (and, I think, the implication is that after a year or so she WILL be joining the mummies in the catacombs).

>60 housefulofpaper: but I am more mindful these days that they, are, after all, human remains, and were, probably still are, utitised with a lack of due respect to that fact. That feeling of discomfort has an element of the awareness of mortality in it.

I have long thought that . I love reading about archeology and fascinated with the kind of data they are able to get about history through the research of thos bones. But in the latest Arcaeolgy mag about finding more information about the nativ Brits after Rome left It included a photo of a family, grandmother, mother and child together, with them being cleaned and dug up. Just makes me sad despite my fascination how much they are able to learn, I assume a few thousand years from now the same will happen to us.

I was never scared of skeletons and mummies but I also remember that scene in Nosferati and yeah, dont think I slept well that night

I found "The Watchful Poker Chip of Henry Matisse" to be just weird. Someone help me out here and tell me what I am missing.

>59 LyndaInOregon: I have "The Jar" listed for next week — have we changed our course?

I shall address my thoughts on "Poker Chip," first, saving comments on "The Skeleton" for tomorrow.

In my mind, Bradbury produces two genres of work, and often works which tread into both categories: descriptive horror, and futuristic sci-fi fables about the danger of technology. This story seemed to defy these categories in a way that left me somewhat unsatisfied, I must admit. Perhaps the tale was more shocking in its contemporary time, and I am too adjusted to the idea of body modification for the sake of fitting in/popular attention to have the emotional reaction which was intended.

Of course the idea of self-mutilation for the sake of the continued interest of others isn't particularly appetizing, but I hardly find it shocking. What are eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, girdles, and high heels, if not self-mutilation for the approval of a certain population? These things are not new ideas, but perhaps the dots simply hadn't been drawn in Bradbury's time, or these were matters which were so taboo to discuss that men didn't consider them enough to be, as I suppose I am, inoculated to the horror of the notion. Or perhaps the notion of self-mutilation for the continued interest of others simply wasn't horrifying when a woman was doing it.

Maybe I'm being too cynical. It's possible my comparisons are exactly what Bradbury was trying to construct a metaphor for, although I have to say that I doubt it.

To pivot my analysis a little, I must say that as a disabled person, I did take a little delight in the fun, unique prosthetics Garvey came up with. Self-amputation of an otherwise healthy limb/digit is a genuine mental disorder, but an amputee is still disabled, regardless of the reason of their amputation (although, 'wants to sustain the attention of a unique crowd of avant-garde peers' isn't a root cause of BIID that I'm aware of). Every disabled person is unique, and there is plenty of customization of prosthetics and disability aids to reflect that! Perhaps that is part of the reason I didn't engage with this story as horror — if I was missing an entire hand or an eye, of course I would want something artful and unique to replace it (although getting insurance to cover it would be an extreme challenge)!! People are going to stare at a visibly disabled person in public no matter what, treat me differently no matter what. I may as well control the way the way they talk, and express my personal style, in any way that I can.

To me, this story was interesting strictly in the surface level, concrete ideas it brought up, like a prosthetic leg with a bird cage in it. That's awesome!! On a deeper level, I just found it kind of boring. A standard sort of 'don't lose parts of yourself to fit in' moral in a literal, vaguely ableist package. Yes, of course it isn't rational to chop off your hand to keep someone's interest, but are unique prosthetics really so absolutely horrifying or bizarre as a concept?

I thought “The Watchful Poker Chip of Henry Matisse” was more humor, or satire, than horror, albeit in a “weird fiction” mode, and I think the joke’s on the avant garde who are desperate to stay ahead of banal popular trends. George Garvey knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. I didn’t think it was so much a cautionary tale against body mods as a cautionary tale about being one of those “sheeple” who tries to keep up with the Joneses. Hence the monstrous wink at the end.

My take on "The Watchful Poker Chip of Henry Matisse" The period of post WWII into the fifties was known for dull conformity, although there was also a rich counter-culture developing & I believe this story takes on these contrasts in affectionate satire. Certainly. nobody "wants" to be dull, so George comes to enjoy the attention he receives & seeks to continue it.

I didn't remember the details of this story but I did remember feeling disappointed in it when I read The October Country for the first time. It seemed a minor piece and out of place in a collection of horror, or at least spooky, Hallowe'en season stories.

My guess is that it's here to "elevate the tone" of the book, away from straight genre material. I don't have any evidence for my theory, but bearing in mind that Bradbury was seeing mainstream success with sales to "the slicks" - magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, alongside the praise from some literary heavyweights for his science fiction, etc., I think he was keen that this book not seem like a backward step. So in go some more "sophisticated" fare.

It's not all that sophisticted though, as has already been noted here. One thing I did like about the story, was that it didn't simply rubbish the avant garde crowd to champion a dull '50s conformism. Rather it made the point that George had that questioning, interested spirit that the beatniks ostensibly championed, but that it had been squashed by "society", and implies that we all have it within us. And of course, he also has some fun with the beatniks' own conformism, and their drifting into appreciation of current and old mass media. Which actually seems to have been pretty prescient given the attention to any and all old TV, film, radio. (My DVD/Blu-ray collection, for starters, though I wouldn't dare to call myself an intellectual. The people writing the booklets and contributing to the disc extras and commentaries, however...)

That still doesn't explain what earns it the right to be included in what is, when all's said and done and allowing for protecting a growing literary reputation, a collection of horror stories. Given the 1950s ableist attitude to body modification (which I evidently still shared in to some extent, thanks, @GraceCollection, for your perspective on that) I would say that the accidents and medical issues that led to the finger guard and monocle (and the contemplation of intentional further modification) qualified it for inclusion. I wonder of Edgar Allan Poe might also have been in Bradbury's mind. His comedy stories, or some of them, get collected and anthologied alongside the more straightforward horrors. There's his story "The Man Who Was Used Up", in particular.

When I read “The Watchful Poker Chip of Henry Matisse” all I could think of was Trump trying to stay in the spotlight.

>67 Neil_Luvs_Books: Ha! “Weird,” indeed!

Thank you for sharing your perspective, >64 Charon07: & >65 ChrisG1:. In hindsight, I think this is definitely satire and I needed a reminder about the cultural zeitgeist of post-war conformity. I was in 'Bradbury mode' and while expecting sci-fi and/or horror, the satire flew straight over my head. I agree with >66 housefulofpaper:, it was tonally out of place here.

As promised, today I write about 'The Skeleton.'

I LOVED this story. Maybe it was because of the context I shared last week (>45 GraceCollection:), or the irony of unknowingly sharing this childhood fear immediately before it became relevant, or because the story seemed, to me, to be in the style of the children's horror stories I read as a kid, but this entire story cracked me up! A man is at war with the SKELETON inside him... he's fighting his OWN skeleton! 'There was a SKELETON inside him at this very moment!' This story was hilarious and I loved it. The breadsticks were practice. I actually laughed, audibly, while reading this story.

This was the best one so far, and we're only getting started!

I know this probably was not the reaction Bradbury intended. However, I have a very intimate relationship with skeletons. In fact, there's one VERY close to me right now... You might even say it's inside me at this very moment!

I remember reading “The Skeleton” before, and then as now, I couldn’t help but think that Walter de la Mare did it first in his poem “Bones”. (Read the story first if you don’t want spoilers!) The poem is simultaneously funny and very creepy, but I think Bradbury bested the creepiness at the end!

"The Skeleton" is one of the creepy ones that stayed with me for years. The notion of the "jellyfish" speaking to Clarisse, and the final fillip of Mr Munigant making a piccolo of Harris's long bones (the radius, do you suppose?) was brilliant.

Excellent observations on 'The Watchful Poker Chip...', thanks all!

I thought 'The Skeleton' was a good example of psychological horror, while seemingly impossible and unlikely, Bradbury at least made it feel slightly within the realm of the possible.

According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database "The Skeleton" was first published in the issue of Weird Tales dated September 1945, and it was one of the stories in Dark Carnival in 1947.

I must have first read it when the huge collection The Stories of Ray Bradbury came out in paperback in the UK (split across two volumes). That would have been 1983. I'm not sure I knew what a breadstick was, back then!

There's a long essay on Ray Bradbury, dating back to 2005/6, by the late Joel Lane, entitled "The October Revolution". In it, Lane asserts that "Bradbury's influence on the American weird fiction of the last five decades has exceeded that of any other writer in the genre"..."More than any of the writers who followed him, Bradbury defined the genre as a kind of negative humanism: a domain of dark psychological and social metaphors in which the supernatural stood for mortality and its precursors, the pathologies of the body and mind".

I'd decided that I had nothing to say about the story directly, that it would be like overanalysing a joke (some stories, particularly genre stories, work like jokes: accept one or more unlikely premisses, but then follow their logic, and come to a surprising and satisfying conclusion). But in light of the quote from Joel Lane, that "negative humanism" and "dark psycholog{y}" may well be operating here too.

A litttle further on in his essay Lane goes on to point out that Ray Bradbury had disciples of a sort, among a set of slightly younger Californian writers, including Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, both of whom went on to, among other things, contribute scripts to The Twilight Zone. So if any elements of these stories seem conventional for "this kind of thing", it seem we're actually reading the originator of them.

Finished "The Jar" this morning, and have a full page of notes!

But the first thing I wanted to run past the group was an odd realization that came to me about halfway through -- this story shares the same essential core as "Poker Chip". In it, a man attempts to enhance his social status through possession of a bizarre object. And yet they are very different stories.

For one thing, there is no way they would work if the locales were swapped.
For another, "The Jar" has an eldritch air that "Poker Chip" lacks.

What other similarities are there in the two stories? What other major differences?

>66 housefulofpaper: what is sophisticated writing and how does bradbury fit in?

Really enjoyed Skeleton The idea of it to me was novel and interesting. Surely a wink and a nod at out childhood nighmares.

>69 GraceCollection: I was in 'Bradbury mode' and while expecting sci-fi and/or horror, the satire flew straight over my head.

this is what I love about his writing. Im not a fan of horror, but his twists and satire make it palatable to me

Finished The Skeleton and enjoyed it. I suspected the ending after the initial visit to the M. Munigant. I think this would have made a great Twilight Zone episode.

I seem to be slightly ahead of the curve with "The Jar", but I'm going to be away from the keyboard all day tomorrow (Portland Meetup, here I come!), so I'm going to go ahead and drop another comment.

Some of us have reported discomfort with Bradbury's often dismissive treatment of women (although Thedy in "The Jar" is definitely her own agent). It's something contemporary readers simply have to deal with as being part of the 1950s gestalt in which he worked. It's like Mark Twain's use of the "N" word in his writings.

Which brings me to Jahdoo, "the black man from Heron Swamp". Jahdoo is perilously close to caricature, with dialogue that threatens to slip into dialect and being described as "toss(ing) his ivory eyeballs, like a dusky juggler, in his head." That's a tough line to read.

But then Bradbury gives him one of the most amazing lines in the whole story -- as Jahdoo begins his theory of what's in the jar, "(h)is voice needled a dark thread pattern, picking up each person by the lobes of their ears and sewing them into one unbreathing design."

Where do we draw the line between accepting good writing in vintage fiction that includes ideas no longer acceptable in current culture, and rejecting an entire body of work out of hand?

>78 LyndaInOregon: I agree with both of your points - yes, it's a bit jarring (pun intended) to our modern sensibilities to see how women & minorities were portrayed in that time period & yes, it's just something we have to deal with.

In "The Jar," I was struck by the human ability to see what we want to see. Our experiences & biases color our perception. And all of that in a creepy tale with an implied murder near the end.

>78 LyndaInOregon: I totally agree, I have been listening to the audio and I gasped when I heard those lines. You're right that Jahdoo seems to have the best handle on how people perceive what is in that jar.

I am finding these stories to be a lot more unsettling than I was expecting, especially The Skeleton. I have known some hypochondriacs who left themselves in pretty bad shape by seeking treatment from sketchy sources.

>79 ChrisG1: Yes, I also was struck by the theme of The Jar that we all want to see what we want to see. It’s an interesting comment in light of the caricature of Jahdoo: Bradbury is writing about unconscious bias while his own unconscious bias is written into the story.

>80 clamairy: I am finding these stories to be a lot more unsettling than I was expecting

my first read of his in HS was the martian chronicles we read it as a group and i loved being unsettled by his work. It adjacent to horror, but not enough for me to run from it

>82 cindydavid4: My first introduction to Ray Bradbury was The Illustrated Man also read in HS. I remember reading that first story, The Veldt and thinking at the end “wait… what?!… are those lions eating… nah! Those kids couldn’t be that ruthless… could they?”

Completely freaked me out.

You know what? I boogered up last week's reading list! "The Jar" was supposed to be this week. Oh, well. What that means is that we have two stories for this week:
"The Lake"
"The Emissary"

So ... short list this week, since they are both quite brief.

The Jar:
Jahdoo disappointed me as well. I think it was a story in The Illustrated Man (although I hope I don't embarrass myself by misremembering the author or confusing two separate works with one another) wherein Bradbury writes of Black folks who simply tired of the inequality and maltreatment they found on Earth, packed up, and lived fulfilling and satisfying lives on Mars (spoilers for that story ahead) until the white men (typical of his period, Bradbury divided the race of humanity into — literally — Black and white, with no thought about other ethnicities, or even of mixed-race individuals. But I digress) blew themselves up with nuclear weaponry and the survivors came begging on their knees to the world Black people had built for themselves, finding Earth uninhabitable.

Although I forget the title,I found that story rather compelling and well-written, despite some biases that I think in Bradbury's time were, begrudgingly, understandable. So I was pretty surprised/disgusted to read some of the lines about Jahdoo. Early Bradbury, I suppose...

I did find Jahdoo's comments surprisingly deep and philosophical to come out of such a racist caricature's mouth. Little victories, I guess.

I have my own Jar in my home. I had a growth removed, about the size of a tennis ball, and after the surgery I was pleasantly surprised that the doctor let me keep the thing. He had a nurse put it in a solution in a jar, after removing a small sample for a biopsy (all turned out well, no worries for me.) I found the thing fascinating, especially considering that it had been inside me, but so far have found little interest or excitement among anyone else about it. Maybe if I had obscured the origin of the thing inside the jar.... but no. Most people don't even want to look at it.

Something I haven't noticed anyone else bring up, yet, is that in the beginning of the tale, when the carny-worker negotiates the price, it is described that he 'nodded at his old acquaintance' and although that could be a metaphor, I wonder if perhaps the old contents of the Jar were not so different from the new ones....

>85 GraceCollection: Contents of the jar
I think it's made pretty clear by Thedy that the contents of the jar were just artificial constructs (at least when Charlie brought it home!), and the general narrative implied that selling the jar was an ongoing hustle: "Rubber, papier-mache, silk, cotton, boric-acid ... {with} a metal frame inside!".

Charlie was certainly not the only "hick" to whom the mysterious artifact was sold -- note how the carny manages to learn from Charlie just how much cash he has to make the purchase, and adjusts its selling price to that amount.

As to what the jar contains now ... well, that's one of Bradbury's trademark draw-your-own-conclusion endings, though Charlie's parting shot at Tom Carmody -- "I reckon we'll never know" -- pretty well spells it out.

>86 LyndaInOregon: I don't think we have to take the carny at his word, though. If I had killed someone and put them in a jar, I certainly wouldn't be revealing to anyone who asked the truth of what exactly was in that jar. Furthermore, we don't even know that Thedy and Tom went to see the carny. We don't have to take her at her word, either. It's heavily implied she's cheated on Charlie before, she could have gone for a round in the hay and then told Charlie something to ruin his fun because she's sick of all the people in her house, and as a cover story on where they went together.

I don't think it's a sure thing that there used to be a different person in that jar, one whom the carny knew, but I don't think it's a sure thing either that both Thedy and, allegedly, the carny told the truth.

>87 GraceCollection: Interesting alternative theories, Grace! I really never thought of it in that way.

This is at least half the fun of readalong discussions -- getting different readers' takes on the same text!

Hey, did y'all notice that we got mentioned in Tim's September "State of the Thing"?

I just finished reading The Lake. This is my fav story so far: a beautiful, beautiful story. It so evocative of the feelings that often come with Autumn (at least for me) of loss and remembrances. What is it about Fall that evokes that in me? Even though September would often bring some excitement about the start of a new school year and what my courses might be like (what was I going to learn, was the instructor going to be good, who new might I meet?), there is always the loss of the freedom that I associate with summer. I think Bradbury nailed that feeling in this story’s prose.

>90 Neil_Luvs_Books: Interesting take, and I understand what you are saying about his evocation of the end-of-summer loss which autumn can sometimes bring.

Beyond that, I have to rate this as one of my least favorite Bradbury shorts. While it's successful in its mood, I'm always left with the feeling that this was somehow an unfinished fragment of thought that needed further development.

Why would Tally (or Tally's ghost) choose that particular moment to respond to Harold's 10-year-old invitation to come build her half of the sand castle? What was being implied by the statement that "the life guard tried to persuade her to come out, but she did not. He came back with only bits of water-weed in his big-knuckled fingers, and Tally was gone." Was Tally a suicide at 12?

It just didn't hang together for me.

“The Jar” and “The Lake” are my two favorite stories from this collection so far. As I mentioned earlier, my first introduction to “The Jar” was as an Outer Limits episode, which I saw as a small child, and it was creepy then for entirely different reasons than now. That poor little kitten is also haunting me.

I agree with >90 Neil_Luvs_Books: that “The Lake” is a beautiful, sad, evocative story. >91 LyndaInOregon:, my impression was that Tally’s body had finally just been found, which is why she was able to respond at last. And it was not my impression that Tally committed suicide, only that “ She had gone too far out, and the lake would not let her return.”

I did like The Lake. It was very haunting in a really sad way. I can't imagine what happens to a body after 10 years in the water, especially the body of a child you know... or maybe I almost can imagine it, and that's why it makes my skin crawl. 'So many years, and the things they do to people's face and bodies' indeed.

I read the 'persuading her to come out' more as a metaphor for the feeble attempt to rescue her from drowning, not that she had intended to commit suicide.

It's something that haunts me a little, but which isn't often brought up in fiction — someone the same age as you who dies young will never age again, even while you grow old. An acquaintance of mine used to be 2 years older than me, but he passed away suddenly at twelve, and now I'm an adult and he will always be twelve. Because of the time I've spent dwelling on this, I was really struck by the way Bradbury contrasts the adult narrator with Tally's small size in that little sack.

I also found it really compelling the way Harold suddenly flashes back to being that child he was when he loved Tally, to the point that his wife, the woman he traveled to the beach with, becomes like a stranger to him.

Personally, I found the ending rather sweet. To finally be able to play and make sand castles again together. It maybe wasn't quite a 'horror' story, but I found it moving nonetheless.

>93 GraceCollection: its a stretch but annabelle lee popped into my head when I read this (btw there is a song version of that poem. )

here is a better version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtAXmO0FNj0

>94 cindydavid4: Ah, Poe. He was my real introduction to horror. 'In her tomb by the sounding sea...'

I just finished “The Emissary,” and while it owes a heavy debt to “The Monkey’s Paw”, it makes up for it with the beautiful introduction and by being told from the POV of a boy, which Bradbury does so well and which makes it especially poignant.

"The Emissary" is probably my favorite Bradbury short. Even though I know where it's going, it still raises the hair on the back of my neck, and it's my go-to when I'm attempting to describe horror writing that doesn't depend on buckets of gore being strewn about. (Jonathan Aycliffe's The Vanishment is a close second here.)

Even if the story wasn't 5-star in that regard (which it is), we have that amazing first section, describing so exuberantly how Dog goes forth into the world and brings back the colors, the smells, and the textures of the world that Martin can no longer experience firsthand.

Yes, The Emissary was a thrill to read. Even beyond COVID quarantine, I've had times in my life when I was unable to leave my house for weeks at a time. When Dog doesn't come home and Bradbury describes that 'the world was a picture under glass, untouchable. The world was dead,' I related to that a lot. Now I wish I had an emissary of my own, to bring the world in when I can't experience it myself! This story was so evocative.

And of course, what does a dog do besides dig and fetch what his master requires?

I was impressed with both 'The Lake' and 'The Emissary' because his writing is so atmospheric. I was suitably creeped out by the second one. Do we know why Martin is stuck in bed? I'm listening to the audio so I may have missed it.

These are definitely my two favorite stories so far. I know we still have a long way to go.

I enjoyed 'The Lake' but found the ending sad. Will he be able to resume his life with Margaret again, or has his happiness been ruined?

>89 LyndaInOregon: How about that! Thanks for the reminder.

>99 clamairy: I think at one point the tag he attaches to Dog's collar reads, in part, 'my owner is sick in bed.' I don't think we get any more than that.

>100 Karlstar: My hope was that once they left the area he would remember why he loved her.

>102 GraceCollection: Thank you.

Did anyone else think it was odd that the woman who was supposed to be sitting with Martin left the house once he said he was falling asleep? Was she only there to get him something if he needed it while he was awake?

I thought that was a little weird, too. When I was a child, any babysitters I had stayed there until my parents got home — not just until I fell asleep. They may have left me home alone for a few hours, but not at night, and certainly not when I was ill.

The story wouldn't have worked had Martin not been alone in the house at the conclusion. I agree that the sitter leaving was rather odd, though, if considered in real-world terms.

>98 GraceCollection: And of course, what does a dog do besides dig and fetch what his master requires?

Im a little slow, had to read this twice before it clicked. I need to add this to my imaginary list of fav Bradburys stories! I could read those descriptions of Dogs gifts once every day and not be tired.

I enjoyed both The Lake and The Emissary, with little to add to the above comments. Mostly, I was awed by Bradbury's prose - his ability to create just the right mood to the story he was telling.

>96 Charon07: I know the story of the Monkeys Paw but am missing the connection explain pls

Just amazed by his talent at painting a scene with words, and unlike other authors his descriptions do not take away from the story or get to be over much. Bravo!

>108 cindydavid4: They’re both stories about wishing the dead back to life. In “The Monkey’s Paw,” as I recall, the dead son is wished back to the grave before he enters the parents’ house, unlike Miss Haight. The creepiness of both is enhanced by our knowing that the dead person is approaching but never actually seeing them.

ok, I see that, thanks

>108 cindydavid4: Connection with "The Monkey's Paw": An elderly couple lose their son in some kind of industrial accident. The mother (I think) comes across a "magic" monkey's paw that will grant any wish. She wishes to have her son back. The final scene occurs when something -- presumably the reanimated but mangled corpse of the dead son -- bangs on the door.

So it's the wish for the return of a dead loved one without specifying that the loved one be returned in a living condition.

Oops - Charon was faster on the draw than I was!

>103 clamairy: I thought it was odd, but maybe normal for the '40s and '50s?

WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 29

Two stories this week, and unless my memory is failing (a definite possibility), at least one of them was made into a Twilight Zone / Outer Limits / Night Gallery episode.

"Touched with Fire"
"The Small Assassin"

>75 cindydavid4:

what is sophisticated writing and how does bradbury fit in?

I'm sorry I wasn't able to respond earlier. Work and real life got in the way.

I didn't intend to suggest that there was a genre or literary mode named "sophisticated writing", not least because I've come to the conclusion (after trying to define "Gothic Fiction" and "Folk Horror") that if it's not impossible, it's beyond my abilities. Not only do the genres have fuzzy borders but worse, even trying to identitfy one or two defining characteristcs quickly throws up counter-examples.

That said, I think it's still fair to say that the contents of the genre magazines in the 30's and 40s, and into the '50s - adventure, crime, science fiction, horror, fantasy, romance, - where Ray Bradbury's career started, and where many of the stories in The October Country first appeared - were not respected. Even today, a particularly moving or exciting or successful in artistic terms, example is praised as "transcending the genere" or marketed as mainstream or literary fiction.

There was still a strong market for short fiction when Ray Bradbury's career started (and he continued to write short fiction throughout his career). But I assume that the more respected, and no doubt better paying mainstream outlets, would look for a different type of story. The more literary story would follow the Modernist trends of ambiguity in all sorts of ways (e.g. formal story structure, untrustworthy narrators, moral ambiguity, etc.); assuming a level of cultural and historical knowledge; and so on.

I find it interesting that the 1959 shory story collection A Medicine for Melancholy (subtitle on the US hardcover "stories of wonder and delight") has a fair proportion of non-genre stories, including the title story. When it was published in the UK, the publisher changed the contents, including removing the title story, and renaming the book The Day it Rained Forever - still firmly positioning Bradbury as a science fiction writer. The Wikipedia entry for the book includes a comparision table of the variant contents:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Medicine_for_Melancholy. If you can access the short story "A Medicine for Melancholy", see if you think it succeeds as wise and urbane and yes, sophisticated, in its treatment of sex, or if the UK publisher (Rupert Hart-Davis, I think) was wise to drop it.

Turning (finally) to the story that was under discussion, I don't think that it's particularly sophisticted as satire because tthe "compare and contrast" treatment of the conventionalities of '50s conformism, and the avant garde's own conventions and ficklenesses, doesn't really rise above sitcom writing. As I wrote earlier, it's Bradbury saying that George had always had a more enquiring, interested, "bigger" spirit than any thought and it had been squashed down by the conformist society of the day, that elevates the story for me (the body modification theme doesn't resonate for me, but I am not so stuck in the past that I would automatically class any treatment of the subject as "horror", so I sort of end up swerving the whole topic - central though it is - when I think about this story).

>113 Karlstar: Yes, the babysitter leaving once Martin said he was going to sleep was strange. But I simply assumed this was small town life in the 50s.

Wow, I liked “The Emissary”. I agree with others. “The Emissary” and “The Lake” have made this group Bradbury read worthwhile. I never would have read them otherwise. Excellent stories.

"The Jar"

One strand of Ray Bradbury's early career - a time he wrote about as if it was an apprenticeship, but he was making sales and making a name for himself early on - is his crime stories. The majority of them are Noirish in style, and the Charlie/Thedy/Tom triangle is textbook James M. Cain style Noir.

I think on balance the original thing in the Jar was probably a fake of some sort (would the carny have let it go if it was evidence of a crime? Although I think more or less dubiously-obtained medical specimens were tolerated in a way that would trigger a criminal investigation now).

The other element of the story and what raises it above a Noir crime story, is the effect the jar has on Charlie's neighbours, finding unexpected depths in these "ordinary" people (another parallel with "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse", maybe?) - sparking philosophical and religious speculations, bringing up repressed menories, triggering raw traumas. And it doesn't matter, for this, what's in the jar.

I think that although he was basically a conservative, Bradbury was socially progressive in many ways. But given the times in which he was writing, sometimes he'll write something that makes you wince, or worse, even if you can see that he intends to be empathetic, or an ally (in its current meaning). That's how I read the Jahdoo sections of the story.

"The Jar" was first published in the November 1944, edtion of Weird Tales magazine, and it was included in Dark Carnival in 1947.

>112 LyndaInOregon: I am thinking there are also different versions of Monkey Paw, but probably all leading to the same ending. thanks to both of you for your comments

I found the sitter gone was odd to, However -Martin stays in bed, he does not go out, so they may have thought theres nothing to worry about him getting up and going outside unless Miss Tarkin was somehow involved. she had no love for Dog which might mean she had no love for Martin....we also dont know how young Martin is. If he's 8 or so and can probably take care of himself, leaving him wouldn be odd, younger than that, yea

>119 cindydavid4: Martin is 10.
MY OWNER IS MARTIN SMITH—TEN YEARS OLD—SICK IN BED—VISITORS WELCOME.

>115 housefulofpaper: wow, I wasnt expection such complexity to my simple question, Thank you!

first i dont recall the term sophisticated writing as a genre (love your example) it was a term you used and such generalilzations usually get my hackles up. You are right about the feelings of genre back in the day Given that it surprising Bradbury et all. ended up being very successful certainly thing have changed and we are richer for it. Then again "Even today, a particularly moving or exciting or successful in artistic terms, example is praised as "transcending the genere" or marketed as mainstream or literary" but you are right, like before, its dividing literature into the good and not so good Some things never change it seems

I am not sure I understand your last part. I dont think thi story had anything to do with satire. It was typical of the other stories Ive long adored:a plot with psychological memes, adjacent to a horror ending. but thats just me. and no matter how this is described, Im happy with how it seems to me I do appreciate your comments

>120 elorin: sigh. Does it help that I have read it three times and each just didnt notice the first line! thanks for the catch. so if hi is 10 I can see the sitter not being concerned, about leaving him alone

This is kind of a sideways question, prompted by the babysitter leaving. As I said initially, the story simply doesn't work unless Martin is at home alone. Bradbury could have ginned up any reason to get Miss Tarkin out of the picture -- she liked to be home by 9 and Martin's parents were expected to be back by 9:30 at the latest; Miss Tarkin is suddenly taken ill; whatever. If Bradbury gave it any thought at all, he probably assumed the explanation would slow the story down unnecessarily.

But the question (comment) is this -- one occasionally sees long, involved backstories for characters who ultimately have nothing to do with the main plotline. It's more often seen in novels than in short pieces, and it may have been nothing more than padding. But is there a particular name for the practice?

Example -- The book opens with a taxi driver cruising for fares. He gets three pages of well-written backstory detailing his marital woes, personal and professional aspirations, the state of his finances, his political leanings, and what he plans to have for dinner after his shift ends. Then he picks up the main character(s) in the story, takes them wherever, and drives off into the night, never to be seen again in the story.

Just one of those random questions that leaped into my mind and won't go away.

One thing that strikes me about these stories is that they feel like finished concepts. They aren't too short or incomplete. So many short stories are a neat concept that feels like it wasn't finished. That's not the case with any of these.

"The Small Assassin" gave me the creeps, don't even want to think about it.

I have read Touched with fire three times in the last few days and dont quite get it; two dogooders wanting to help people, a very nobel pursuit. But it all goes wrong of course. was not sure what happened exactly and what the point was. Interested in your comments (it didnt help reading this book while we are baking here in another 110 degree day.)

My thoughts on Touched with Fire:

Bradbury makes some good points here about mental health.

When we are struggling, we have a tendency to be mean and rude and push other people away — although, in my observations, this usually comes up in the way we treat loved ones. Family, friends, partners. We push them away and sabotage our close relationships because we believe we don't deserve that love, or that we will inevitably mess it up somehow so we might as well do it now, on purpose, than to lose that relationship when the loss is out of our control and hurts us even more, or so the thinking goes. It isn't very logical, but it's very common.

Another observation he makes, he seems to lump into this first observation, but in my mind these are separate patterns. He notes that people who are in a bad place tend to — sometimes consciously and sometimes not quite — put themselves into danger. These people may not be actively suicidal but are sometimes (depending on the severity) described as passively suicidal. They (luckily) don't take the initiative to take their own life, but (unfortunately) often don't take what would be considered normal precautions to avoid danger, such as wearing a seatbelt, or sometimes actively take risks that would be considered dangerous or foolhardy, such as speeding on a road.

Bradbury is also correct, although I don't know if the statistics about this were public back then, that murders happen more often in hot weather — although I don't know anything about '92 degrees' specifically.

Now moving to the parts I didn't like. Self-sabotaging relationships tends to be a mental health response towards loved ones specifically. I'm not a licensed professional, but I don't know that many people intentionally act brash and rude to everyone as part of this response. Of course, there are people who have a bad day and, intentionally or otherwise, take that out on others, and people who simply have a brash personality. But I wouldn't connect the way Mrs. Shrike acts with relationship sabotage or passive suicidal patterns the way Bradbury does, and personally it comes off a little victim-blamey to me. 'Well, maybe she's acting so rude/assertive/etc because deep down she wants someone to kill her.' I know Bradbury didn't write this as a cautionary tale about women being demanding to waitstaff, or as a sympathy towards murderers, but... still.

Furthermore, and I'm sure those who have read my other analyses know where I'm going with this, but... the misogyny. Every paragraph of this story seemed, to me, to be dripping with disdain for this stereotype Bradbury wrote of a nagging harpy who makes everyone around her miserable by being outspoken and demanding more than what is acceptable for a woman to expect. I believe the current slang for this archetype is a 'Karen,' and as you can imagine, I have limited patience with this term as well. (Just to be clear, abuse of waitstaff is unacceptable, including the fictional actions Bradbury had this fictional woman perform, but I have seen the term 'Karen' thrown around to demean women who, for example, send back a dish that wasn't what they asked for, and then once these women are 'Karens,' violent and even sexual threats & verbal abuse is just and fair retribution for their 'Karenness.')

Then, even beyond Mrs. Shrike as a caricature, the fact that the worst and most stinging insults that Bradbury can think of, ones that hurt the men even more than the presumed expletives she was throwing at them, were 'grandmas,' 'old maid,' and when that one got worn out, she just repeated 'woman' over and over. Really?

Overall, I was less than impressed with this story. I find domestic abuse (in this case referring to the implied murder of Mrs. Shrike by Mr. Shrike via that nasty hook at the end, since the apartment is at 92 degrees) to be a rather cheap form of horror unless it is done really well. This was not Bradbury's best work, in my opinion.

I'll discuss my thoughts about 'The Small Assassin' tomorrow.

>125 cindydavid4: My synopsis of “Touched with Fire”: The two retired insurance salesmen have become able to identify people who have a death wish, so to speak: “Doesn’t want to live any more. Deliberately aggravates people.”—until somebody ups and kills them. The nasty woman in the tenement, Mrs. Shrike (!), is someone they’ve so identified. For the first time they decide to intervene, but that doesn’t go so well. She lets loose a tirade (which is repeatedly likened to the fire of the title), and Foxe gets angry enough in response to try to hit her with his cane (hence he was touched by fire). She has slipped and fallen, though, and Shaw drags him out of the tenement. While they’re collecting themselves, they see her husband come home, carrying a longshoreman’s hook. We’re left to conclude that he’ll kill his wife with it.

This was possibly my least favorite story so far, with its implication that she was a termigant, so she was “asking for it.”

>125 cindydavid4: Easily the worst story in the collection so far, completely forgettable for me.

>125 cindydavid4:, >126 GraceCollection:, >127 Charon07: & >128 Karlstar: An awful story. There's a bit of body shaming there as well, against both of the Shrikes, and what appeared to be snobbery, as Mr. Shrike is a blue collar worker.

I do remember hearing that idea that crime rates go up when it gets hot when I was younger. The idea being that people's tempers are shorter and they aren't thinking as clearly. A quick Google search seems to confirm this, but the temperature I saw mentioned was "85°F and above."

The Assassin creeped me out. I was very happy when it was over.

“The Small Assassin” is not the sort of horror that Bradbury excels at. While I think ambiguity about being a mother is an interesting topic worth exploring, the story wasted too many pages on “rational explanations” when it should have let the inherent creepiness of the concept and our imaginations carry the horror, as better “bad seed” stories have done. (I don’t think any of this is much of a spoiler after you read the title and the first few paragraphs.) I think the very ending with the doctor and the scalpel was particularly heavy-handed and distasteful. A more effective and less revolting ending would be to have left the doctor, after discovering David Leiber’s body, seeing movement out of the corner of his eye.

>131 Charon07: Yes, that would have been a much better ending.

Interesting in both cases we have two men talking about a woman both who were in crisis mode, they were tormenting these women with some victim blaming as well.

If the purpose of the fire story was to prove that murders go up after a certain temperature it didnt really do so. again the men were turning up the temperature so to speak which didn't help her at all. It would have been interesting to have had a look at her childhood, to see where this anger comes from, aside from temperature. In fact it would have been a better story if there was some back and forth, showing what happened the to cause the anger. But they didnt know to consider that. And it wasnt a scary story.

The assassin was interesting because back then mothers actions were blamed for the behavior of their children, and the term ice mother was common. (some may remember that mothers with autistic children were blamed for being cold. Then there are the two men saying she hated her babe and again blaming the victim. No one was talking to her, asking her thought s, find out her concerns; the assumed everything to be her fault "one would think a woman would take some interest in her child' And omg they are talking over her like she is a speciman. no wonder she was so scared

Interesting that Bradbury wrote this story, not to put the blame on the mother, but to show her humanity, and to condemn their treatment of her

I remember being scared by this story when I watched it. reading it now just made me angry

I thought The Small Assassin was very creepy. I agree that there were elements that could have been better written, and truthfully I wish Bradbury had lingered a little bit more on the opening. Pregnancy and childbirth is a miracle, but it is also a unique and terrifying body horror, and it was refreshing for a male author to admit that, even briefly, when I see so many males (especially politicians) out in the world acting as if the process is all sunshine and kittens, when films like Aliens let us know how men, at least subconsciously, really feel about sustaining a life that then must violently exit your body.

I didn't particularly enjoy the way the men in the story discuss Alice. As >133 cindydavid4: notes, she's being treated like a specimen, and I didn't particularly enjoy the doctor's implications that her doubt must be temporary, it's normal for a mother to hate her child, she just needs a psychiatrist to straighten her out. Of course, much of the horror depends on the fact that her fears aren't rational to the way the world really works, and nevertheless she is right in her irrational fears. But I must say, if my wife came home feeling this type of way about our baby, I certainly wouldn't force her to sleep in the same room as him, be at home all day caring for him, and spur her idea of having a vacation.

In the fifties, when women had very few career prospects, and all of those disappeared at once if she had children, the notion of having a child at all seems like a nightmare. Home all day with them, alone for two weeks when your husband leaves on a business trip almost immediately after the birth, no reprieve from being around the child(ren) unless your husband (with money that's only his) approves of hiring a babysitter... I would go mad myself, outside of any legitimate attempts on my life. I thought this story was good social commentary, outside of some moments I wish had been written better. Although the text seems to imply that Alice was a housewife before the baby, in that era, having a baby very much did assassinate a large part of the opportunities a woman might have, and as was very much glossed over in the text, it was very common for a woman to have no say in if she even wanted a baby at all.

A very chilling tale.

Did anyone else see the pilot episode of the new Dr. show, 'Brilliant Minds'? A woman has an operation and afterwards, does not recognize her children and swears they are imposters. It does not end like 'Small Assassin'.

With all due respect, I have to disagree with those who feel “Touched with Fire” is particularly misogynistic. Is Mrs. Shrike a cruel caricature of the acid-tongued, unpleasant woman? Yes. But essentially, her gender is irrelevant here, with one exception, which I’ll come back to later.

The interesting thing here, to me, Is Bradbury’s notion that there are incipient “murderees” as well as incipient “murderers” in our population – and this is not what today we refer to as “victim-blaming”. It’s something very different, something akin to the psychological kink that makes certain people indulge in activities or habits that are universally acknowledged to be life-threatening. Whether they don’t care, whether they are seeking the adrenaline rush of danger, whether they are in fact subliminally seeking to end an existence which has become too painful for them to bear is a topic for the psychiatrists, the psychologists, and the other doctors of the soul to consider.

In any case, if the author is to examine this notion in a fictional setting, it’s necessary to create a character embodying those violence-inciting behaviors. Mrs. Shrike is essentially a straw-woman. Every word she speaks, every action she takes, every adjective Bradbury uses to describe her, is designed to repulse the reader. The only reason to have made the character female, as far as dramatic choice, is that many males in our culture will accept a higher level of aggression from females than from other males, without immediate retaliation. And because it is allowed, she uses it. This lets her get further and further out of control, until her circle of vituperation is cast so wide that it cannot help but touch someone who will respond to it and the murderee has found her murderer at last.

I don’t find it a particularly successful suspense tale, partly because the approach of the husband doesn’t build throughout the piece. There’s an early setup that tells us he’s not a very nice person, and that’s about it. The overlay of the slowly-rising temperature toward that supposedly magical (malignant?) 92-degree point comes and goes, and the motivation of Foxe and Shaw never really makes a lot of sense.

The one thing that it does spectacularly well is to bring the heat. As always, Bradbury can immerse the reader in the atmosphere of the moment, and he attacks all the senses to get his point across.

>136 LyndaInOregon: That’s a thought-provoking perspective. But I still don’t find true, or psychologically resonant, the notion of incipient murderers and murderees. How is this not victim blaming? The incipient murderee has brought their fate down on themselves by their actions. The incipient murderer in some way is not responsible for their actions.

>137 Charon07: I think it is relevant that the two characters were insurance salesmen. They weren't blaming anyone, they were using statistics to try to prevent what they saw as an inevitable result.

>138 Karlstar: I don't think what Charon is saying is about the characters or their motivations at all, but rather is a reaction to >136 LyndaInOregon:'s analysis, 'Bradbury's notion that there are incipient "murderees"... (is not) "victim-blaming."'

And personally, I agree with >137 Charon07:. I appreciate Lynda sharing her perspective, but whether the concept is based in psychology or not, (which I shared a little of my perspective on), the very notion that there are, as Lynda puts it, 'incipient murderees' places at least some of the blame on that murder victim, and is therefore, as I understand it, victim-blaming.

I also personally don't agree with the notion that "males in our culture will accept a higher level of aggression from females than from other males." A businessman is 'in control' when showing aggression, while a businesswoman is 'a bitch' for simply not smiling enough. A male political candidate showing aggression is a 'strong leader' whereas a female political candidate performing similar displays of aggression is 'hysterical' and 'unfit for office.' Even in confrontations between service staff and members of the public, in my experiences and the ones I've discussed with friends and coworkers, males are always the ones who take it further and get more violent, especially to female service workers, and said service workers, of either sex, are expected to simply take it or lose their jobs. The idea that the average male will accept more vitriolic treatment from someone he, at the very least in the era Bradbury writes here, views as beneath himself before immediate retaliation, as opposed to someone he views as an equal or peer, simply isn't realistic to me based on what I know and have experienced.

These are the days when children (typically viewed as not yet being real or full people who have rights) received corporal punishment, not just from their parents at home but also other family members, teachers, and headmasters at school/in public. These are also the days when advertisements 'playfully' featured men punishing their wives with spanking for not using the correct cleaning product or fixing the right dinner. I don't agree that Mrs. Shrike somehow had some sort of benefit her husband did not, to be allowed to treat people this way with less retaliation than he would have hypothetically received.

New week, new stories! One will probably be familiar (see if you can remember why!) and the other probably won't, unless you're a deep-dyed Bradbury fan.

"The Crowd"
"Jack-in-the-Box"

the crowd was pretty predictable but the mans
demeanor seemed like an Alfred Hithcock character, maybeplayed by Jimmy Stewart.

I think I must have first read "The Lake" in 1983, when a big retrospective of Ray Bradbury's short fiction was first published in UK paperback (split across two volumes). I'd kept a vague sense of it in my head even if I'd forgotten the details of the story, and rereading it now gave me basically the same feelings - of sadness, and how a childhood tragedy had reached forward in time to ruin two adult lives (but there's no sense that Tally is a vengeful ghost..like I wrote, it's just sad.

I had another look at The Internet Speculatvive Fiction Database, and it lists this story as first being published in Weird Tales Magazine, May 1944. The magazine was famously the home of Robert E. Howard's sword and sorcery tales and H. P. Lovecraft's 'regional-New-England-Horor-that-morphs-into-"Cosmic Horror"', as well as more conventional horror, and quite a lot of Science Fiction. By 1944 a new editor was, as I understand, trying to encourage a different type of horror or weird fiction: more character-based and using realistic, modern, predominently US locales. Bradbury's writing certainly fit the bill (and you could very well argue that Stephen King was the highest-profile inheritor of that tradition).

Can't say that either of these stories were familiar to me. Perhaps I missed a popular film or television show?

The Crowd: This story was interesting if predictable. I can't say that I've noticed the same pattern... although, someone crashed their car directly in front of my residence once, almost immediately after I'd gotten home. I was the first person on the scene while my family dialed emergency services, I helped the driver out of the vehicle (she was conscious and mostly okay), got water, etc. Did not notice any crowds of suspicious bystanders, but I will keep my eye out...

Neither of this week’s stories were familiar to me either. And I can’t say I cared all that much for either of them. “Jack-in-the-Box,” in particular, seemed like it was particularly atypical for Bradbury, and not in an area where he excels. It read like a riddle to me, and I was expecting some sort of “gotcha” at the end that would make it all make sense, so I was sorely disappointed by the Freudian/philosophical/symbolic woo-woo.

>144 Charon07: I don't think I'd read either of them and they weren't my favorites in this collection. I thought 'Jack-in-the-Box' was particularly weak. His mother was keeping him prisoner but they never left the house? When did she cook or clean? How did they get groceries?

I think, if anything, "Jack-in-the-Box" was meant to symbolize repression -- note the repeated mention of the tension of the springs in the toy, pushing against the lid, of the catastrophic way that pressure was released, and of the chaotic, uncontrolled reaction to sudden freedom.

Not one of Bradbury's best (wait 'till next week!), and there's no point in asking how they got consumables in or waste out or how the practicalities of day-to-day life worked. He simply chose not to deal with them, the way many early space-travel science fiction writers chose not to deal with the details of how interstellar travel might actually be accomplished.

I thought Jack-in-the-Box was interesting, although I did feel like I missed something somewhere... the motivation of the mother, her end goal, wasn't really clear to me. She wants him to grow into the next 'God' of the house, what does that mean? How can he grow into a role like that when he doesn't even really understand where he is?

Something else I didn't catch was what happened to the mother, but maybe it was supposed to be open-ended. Did she drink herself to death? Have a sudden heart attack/stroke/etc.? Kill herself on purpose? Is it possible she was just unconscious?

Some of the descriptions of the house confused me as well. How did the mother rig it up so that the boy thought he could light a fire in the fireplace or set food on the table by magic? Why would she put in the effort to do that? The room they unlocked for the boy's 'birthday' was clearly some kind of lift. I think the 'highlands' and 'lowlands' just meant different floors in the house, right? The use of words like 'worlds' and 'universes' and 'rolling carpets' and suchlike really confused me, and the whole concept of indoors/outdoors did as well. The opening paragraph seems to imply he has wandered outside before, but after everything with the tower it seems like he's not allowed outside at all. And were the picnics described in the story taking place outdoors or indoors?

I found the notion intriguing, the concept of a boy stuck in a house and fed a warped worldview, his mother pretending to be another person so he thinks there are multiple people in his life when really he is completely isolated, and the idea of what happens to a boy who doesn't even know what death is when he enters the real world without any support whatsoever, and the metaphor of the jack-in-a-box was perfect for this scenario, but the story overall had some weaknesses and overall I found it pretty confusing.

These two were kind of mediocre. The Crowd seemed a lot more familiar to me than The Jack-in-the-box did. Just how old was the boy supposed to be? And what was that part about the house starting to tremble and fade a little bit all about? (I am listening to the audio so I can't find specific passages.)

>147 GraceCollection: >148 clamairy: Now I'm wondering about the boys actual age. He said he'd had multiple birthdays sped up, maybe he wasn't 11, or even close, maybe he was more like 6 or 7? That might make some of the 'worlds' and large size of the house seem more reasonable, exaggerated due to age?

this is another like "the emmisary" with a child who is kept locked at home like martin, like a jack in the box. to me he felt 11 but an immature due to his lack of knowledg of the world

>147She wants him to grow into the next 'God' of the house, what does that mean?

I think first of all that she herself lost because her 'god,father" is dead, and the boy is trying to escape the world they built. not sure what she thinks it means- that the boy willl be god and return status quo? the magical part of it seem to come from the rooms themselvs perhaps. I know he uses this sort of magical realism alot in his novels, and some of my favorite short stories have it too (see "sound of thunder")

>142 housefulofpaper: I wonder about the necessities as well, but you are right; the writer is putting that aside possibly t focus on the story

>148 clamairy: i think the trembling and fading may be the house realizing that the child has escaped,

again, love bradburys descriptions of the world the boy sees as he goes from door to door. and the end when he thinks hes dead, he thinks he has acheived the goal is mother set? think the mothers disappearnce is ment to open ended;she may be fading like the house

>150 cindydavid4: I'm not sure, I think the 'magic' like the fireplace and the food was something the mother did, and not real magic, because the boy couldn't make any of it happen after she died.

I think she either died or was in some kind of medical coma or similar, because of how he interacts with her body, describes her hands as cold, and cannot get her to respond. I just can't figure out what caused it; maybe it's not relevant.

I rather liked The Crowd. We've all noticed the tendency of people to gather around when there's an accident. He takes that rather macabre tendency & creates a creepy alternate explanation - where much of the crowd are the ghosts of victims of accidents past.

Jack In The Box was less effective for me. It almost felt like Bradbury used his purple-est prose to cover for the lack of interest his idea inspired.

Sorry I haven’t participated for the last couple of weeks. Lots of marking to do due to midterms.

These four stories were rather weak IMHO. But I do wonder if part of the reason they seemed weak is that so many of them ended up inspiring more recent stories. For example, “Jack-In-The-Box” very much reminded me of M Night Shyamalan’s film, “The Village.” And “The Crowd” reminded me of his “I see dead people” film “The Sixth Sense.” And that Nicole Kidman film “The Others” is similar except that it is written from the point of view of the dead. So even though I haven’t read these stories before it feels like I have because of more recent media that sure seems were inspired by Bradbury. “The Small Assassin” seemed a little like a film from the 1970s titled “It’s Alive” except in that case the baby is literally a monster but otherwise there seems to be similarities to Bradbury’s story.

I wonder how many films have been influenced by a screen writer reading a Bradbury short story?

In “Touched With Fire” I was impressed with the prose near the end where one of the protagonists feels the rage building. Bradbury really does write well about how something feels or is sensed. He is an evocative writer.

Sorry to be late posting this week's selections -- Real Life caught up with me. (Don't you hate it when that happens?)

Three stories this week, and if we'd purposely tried, I don't think we could have selected any group that better demonstrates Bradbury's versatility. They are:

"The Scythe", one of his darkest and most thought-provoking works. Protect yourself from mental whiplash by taking at least a 24-hour break before moving on to...

"Uncle Einar", which is 180 degrees from dark. It's a whimsical fantasy -- and "whimsical" is not a term often associated with Bradbury.

"The Wind" returns to classic something-is-out-there horror.

Looking forward to seeing more of the great comments that are coming up on this thread!

been out of town and busy willl get back to reading soon

"The Scythe" was...interesting, with a certain Twilight Zone feel to it.

If I remember correctly, Bradbury did write for Twilight Zone for a time. I picked up a similar tone. I enjoyed Bradbury's exploration of the idea that the wheat must be harvested, not only because our protagonist feels physically ill when trying to stop, but also because if he doesn't, victims of physical tragedies like the fire, or car accidents, etc., will be stuck in the sort of limbo he finds his family in, 'not dead, but not alive,' unable to be roused from their slumber. I found the description of the elderly who are 'waiting on that moonless sleep,' compelling. The ending was pretty spooky, the implication that so many needless deaths are happening solely because one grief-stricken man is hacking up green grain indiscriminately.

There were some things that pulled me out of the story. I'm unsure if this is just in the edition I received, some sort of editor's error or something, or if this was some kind of deliberate choice, but when I read the words 'should of' I almost put the book away. That is my number one grammar pet peeve. Just seeing it makes my eye twitch. The correct form is 'should have,' which of course can be appropriately shortened with the contraction 'should've.' They sound, in most dialects I've encountered, almost identical, (so there's no reason to type it incorrectly as a 'phonetic spelling,') but the phrase 'should of' is unique in that it is absolute nonsense. That really peeved me.

The other major thing that pulled me out of the story was the idea that the wheat field had been right there, somewhere in the modern-day United States, 'since the Indians danced' on the land. With my background, this wasn't something I was able to put aside. Wheat is a so-called 'old world' crop, meaning it wasn't anywhere in the Americas for tens of thousands of years of history before Columbus and his gang. Unless I missed something in the text, we don't know exactly where the house was, other than presumably somewhere between Missouri and California, so we don't know what nations lived there before the United States and therefore which, if any, crops were grown there, but even if the nation(s) previously occupying that land were active cultivators of any crops, (corn, perhaps,) they would not have grown the huge, monoculture fields that are so common in the United States today. That tradition came from the old world as well.

I know to some that's a really small detail, but with my background it was impossible to ignore and really took me out of the story.

>157 GraceCollection: It's always disheartening to be pulled out of a story by something that doesn't belong, whether it's a typo, an infelicitous turn of phrase, or a factual error. I'm wondering if the "should of" usage you cited might indeed have been an oddity of the edition you were reading.

I took another look at my copy, and the only thing I can find is a bit of dialogue when Molly says "We must of took the wrong fork" in the road. The usage there, of course, is to signal the speaker's background, education, and social status, and it's consistent throughout the story with both Molly and Drew.

Like you, I was bothered by the notion that the field had been there since time immemorial, and that Cro-Magnon man, who does not appear to have been present in North America and in any case was not a farmer, would have grown a European crop there.

Somewhere along the line, the story seems to have morphed from fantasy -- there is a field whose individual stalks of wheat are tied to specific lives -- into allegory, touching on the notion of The Grim Reaper collecting not just one life at a time but being driven mad by his task and taking the green wheat -- the lives not fully lived -- in the unthinking violence of war.

There are times when we have to forgive a writer some small missteps and give ourselves over to the larger image. This story does that for me. The notion of one mad god or god-ridden man scything down millions of lives in the pointless insanity of war makes as much sense to me as any political motivation.

The Scythe was one of the first of his stories I read, and its one Ive never forgotten. Pratchrtt does something similar in Mort

>158 LyndaInOregon: very well said esp last paragraph

>158 LyndaInOregon: I agree, very well said! I think “The Scythe” is comparable to “The Jack-in-the-Box” in that neither is amenable to picking at the details for a rational explanation of “how it all works,” any more than we can fault Kafka for failing to clarify for us the scientific implausibility of a man turning into a giant cockroach. In fact, I think some of the stories we’ve read that haven’t worked well for me are ones where Bradbury seems to be offering that rational explanation where it shouldn’t be needed (such as “The Small Assassin”), while the ones that work best are the ones where he’s successfully earned our suspension of disbelief. For me, he did earn it in “The Scythe,” which also had psychological resonance that “The Jack-in-the-Box” lacked.

I'm sorry that I wasn't able to contribute for a while. As I feared, work got in the way and frankly I was too tired to put my thoughts in order. I also wanted to reread Ray Bradbury's novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, before Halloween. I thought I could polish it off over a weekend; I was wrong.

The next story I need to discuss is "The Emissary". There isn't, to be honest, much that I can add to the discussion. If I can turn back to Joel Lane's long essay on Bradbury' weird fiction, "The October Revolution", he uses this story to show the stylistic changes made between some stories original magazine appearances, or their first book publication in Dark Carnival. For example, in the revised version Martin'd family name is dropped and Dog loses his original name ("Torry") to become "just Dog, easing the transition from the real to the metaphorical." and claims

What was pointedly suggestive in the first version has become a quiet, fatalistic implication that hides beneath the surface of the text. It is through this serious, understated recognition of horror that the mythic aspects of the story show through: the emissary is Hermes, the messenger who mediates between the living and the dead. Martin is an Orpheus who cannot leave Eurydice behind, because she has come to find him. The realm of the dead is where we live.

I don't entirely see it this way myself. I was more drawn to the idea of the story celebrating Dog as man's (or rather boy's) best friend, "bringing things back" to Martin and - because this is, after all, a horror story, how he does the job all too well.

"Touched by Fire"

Some information from the The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB):
First published in Maclean's Magazine, June 1956 {so this is one of the new stories from the mid-50s, but The October Country wasn't its first place of publication}.
Adapted by Bradbury for television for Alfred Hitchcock Presents as "Shopping for Death" (1956)
Adapted by Bradbury for television for The Ray Bradbury Theatre (1990).

I would have first read this story in 1983, again, this was when The Stories of Ray Bradbury had its UK paperback publication. Two elements of this story had stayed with me decades after the details of the plot had fallen away: the notion of a specific temperature at which violence is almost inevitable, and the idea that people could become "natural victims". Both ideas resonated with personal experience: I suffer in hot weather (not so much as I get older, I find) and I was bullied at bit at school. Not badly as these things go, but it leaves an emotional scar nevertheless (and Mrs Shrike is someone who goads others through her abrasiveness, rather than presenting as weak).

Obviously I've read the previous comments on the story and I can understand why its generated some adverse comment. I think I can understand, although I grew up in the '70s and '80s, a lot of the popular culture I absorbed was older: Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry cartoons, pulp fiction in paperback reprints, classic Hollywood on TV, and so on. I much to a large degree be a creation of the mid-20th Century and to be honest I didn't question much of the story that others found objectionable.

There are some things I would want to suggest:
The two old insurance salesmen (old? younger than I am, I believe! Bradbury just did it to me with the character of Charles Halloway in Something Wicked This Way Comes, as well. 54 years of age and described as old all through the book...seen through the eyes of his teenage son, I suppose). Anyway, the two insurance salesman are representative of that mid-century love of systems and control, from time-and-motion studies to the popularity of psychoanalysis.

I've written earlier that Bradbury is a natural conservative, but he's emphatically on the non-authoritarian side, to the extent that although Mrs Shrike is in essence a cartoon harridan, I think it's clear that his sympathies are with her when she unleashes her tirade on the two men.

But he acknowledges that they only want to do good, and leaves them helplessly awaiting a murder at the end of the story (in a lot of ways, "Touched With Fire" has a kinship with the Noirish early crime stories collected in A Memory of Muder).

Finally, does Ray think he's invented the profession of Actuary with this story?

>158 LyndaInOregon: Aha! I 'must've' (see what I did there?) forgotten which word it was nonsensically preceding the word 'of.' I still hold that 'must've' is phonetically identical to 'must of' and that there was no reason for Bradbury to intentionally write a nonsense phrase. The 'of' instead of 'have/'ve' just really grinds my gears.

I hadn't drawn the connection between the indiscriminate deaths of the hacking of the green grain and the War, but in hindsight, the connection is obvious. I appreciate your analysis.

I remain ambivalent overall about this story. There were images I found very compelling and meaningful, and other images which removed me from the narrative in a way that I, personally, can't fully let go of.

>161 housefulofpaper: 'I was more drawn to the idea of the story celebrating Dog as man's (or rather boy's) best friend, "bringing things back" to Martin and... how he does the job all too well.'

I could not agree more! This was one of the best stories we've read so far, in my opinion, for exactly this reason. Well said!

My thoughts on Uncle Einar:

I LOVED this one. It's still a little weird and fantastical in that Bradbury way, but, so rare for the literary short stories, a happy ending! I'm sure I'm missing a little something here, a statement about 50s conformity, probably, and I'm excited to hear others' analyses. I found the imagery in this story very moving. The caged feeling of being grounded, except for brief stints to dry the laundry, of not being able to even participate in public life or accompany your children out into the world, of losing an entire sense you once held dear and needed to ambulate, followed by the absolute freedom of finding a way to soar, literally, high as a kite.

If I didn't know any better, I might think this was a metaphor for a disabled person finally receiving a medical aide which allows them to participate in public life & enjoy hobbies again. Although, I was once told that we make our own meanings from the stories we read...

>157 GraceCollection: I hadn't thought about the feasibility of wheat being available in the Americas, but it's a good point. I guess I had assumed that he was intimating that Drew would see it as wheat, and a farmhouse, and so on, but that maybe previous wielders of the scythe would have seen the setting differently depending on the age and their background?.

there may be no actual basis for that idea; its possible that my imagination just filled that in for me even without the author's intent.

>165 GraceCollection: followed by the absolute freedom of finding a way to soar, literally, high as a kite.

ive been dealing with chronic pain most of the year, and I caught that same feeling but with him its a kite, for me its finally able to dance again.

>166 Darth-Heather: Interesting notion re Drew seeing a physical setting with which he was familiar. It helps deal with the North American Cro-Magnon wheat farmer image (though I still think Bradbury could have figure out a way to make the eternal existence of the field flow a little better!)

Aside: I once had a journalist friend tell me, in all seriousness, that the primary drive of mankind is not food, shelter, or even reproduction -- it's the urge to edit other peoples' copy! :-)

Anyway ... I can accept the existence of the wheat field (or even what Drew only perceives as a wheat field), but I don't think it's somewhere between Missouri and California in 1938. I think it exists in another, timeless dimension, where a hapless human has been sucked into primal myth. In short, it is located in what Rod Serling would so eloquently define a couple of decades later, as "the twilight zone", lying in that "middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, ... between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge."

Drew is doing what the Old Ones demand of him -- for their amusement, or because they are bored with the task, or for some kind of punishment laid on humanity, or just because the Old Ones are capricious and exist beyond human conceptions of logic.

>165 GraceCollection: LOVE your thoughts on Uncle Einar as a being "caged" and finding a way to regain his freedom.

>168 LyndaInOregon: I like your take on “The Scythe”. That makes sense to me that the field exists in a twilight zone. I really enjoyed this story. I can’t really add anything to what has already been said. Thanks everyone for your analysis. They are as fun to read as Bradbury’s short story.

>167 cindydavid4: I'm glad I'm not the one who felt this way about the story. I'm glad to hear you're able to dance again!

>168 LyndaInOregon: I like this interpretation! Bradbury did write for Twilight Zone, so perhaps this was simply the beginning!

The Wind:

This was, dare I say, a sort of formulaic Bradbury story: character has irrational fear, other characters logically dismiss their concern, their fear, irrational as it is, turns out to be justified, and then they (are at least implied to) die.

I thought this story was interesting in that, unlike most other Bradbury stories with this formula, our narrator can't seem to decide whether he believes his friend's fear is rational or not until it is far too late. I also liked the idea that the wind was taunting him at the end, stealing the voice and laugh of his friend, knowing where he is, and that he's worried about his friend. I was, for a moment, convinced the wind would tear down his house as well, but other than that, I was able to anticipate exactly where this story was going almost from the beginning.

I don't have any particularly strong feelings about this work one way or the other. Wasn't the best story in this collection, wasn't terrible either. It was 'mid,' as the kids say.

>168 LyndaInOregon: think magical realism; I know some arent fans but I love it :) Like your last paragraph, tht explains it well

>173 GraceCollection: From the spoiler (for those of you who didn't peek) "This was, dare I say, a sort of formulaic Bradbury story"

Of course you "dare say"! :-) My only real comment on it would be that I'm surprised it was anthologized, because the "something is out there trying to get in" plotline is one that's been used before (and since!) by horror writers, and sometimes -- dare I say this -- to much greater effect. (I'm thinking of the door-banging scene in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.)

>173 GraceCollection: Good observations, it followed exactly the same pattern as a couple of the other stories.

>170 Neil_Luvs_Books: Agreed, I'm enjoying the discussion.

>175 LyndaInOregon: I really need to check out Hill House. I've liked everything else I've read by Jackson, and have been watching the television adaptation with much terror and anticipation.

>177 GraceCollection: Was not aware of a TV adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. I guess I'll have to look for it, but I'm not going to get my hopes up.

The 1963 movie was truly scary. The 1999 remake was awful. And the recent highly-touted "next chapter" book set at the house, A Haunting on the Hill, was also a disappointment.

>178 LyndaInOregon: I haven't read the book so I can't compare the two, but I have really enjoyed the adaptation so far.

I really enjoyed Uncle Einar. What a joyous ending!

The Wind reminded me of the Scyth, but the former was natures affect on man, the later it was a mans actions. Was I the only one who thought Allin and Tom were having an affair, based on their telephone conversation,? interesting the way it turns

Getting close to the end of the book, and it may be time to buy the first round of trick-or-treat candy. (That's the stuff you buy "early, just so you don't forget" and it all gets eaten, so you have to go back to the store and buy another round, usually on the afternoon of the 30th...)

Anyway, we have two stories coming up this week:
"The Man Upstairs"
"There Was an Old Woman"

Happy reading!

>181 cindydavid4: That did not occur to me

The Man Upstairs! I really liked this one! It was spooky but also unique. I liked the idea that stained glass allows someone to actually see something they otherwise can't, like those puzzles that you had to look through red vellum to be able to see the answer. And the idea that something has totally different and completely unrecognisable anatomy and organs but looks like a human person... I really like that, in any genre (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, etc) but I don't get to see it often.

I also never realised that Bradbury had ever done a vampire story! Or, whatever you call a creature that kills people and is vulnerable to silver. I sort of found myself wishing, throughout this story, that he had revisited the concept sometime closer to his death: how much easier is it for such a creature to hide and blend in when we eat with plastic silverware, pay for things with plastic cards, wear outfits made with plastic buttons, plastic zippers, even plastic jewelry. Maybe vampires work in the oil industry and have been pushing for more and more plastic use... Hmm...

I also enjoyed “The Man Upstairs.” An appropriately spooky story for the season. While the “otherness” of Mr. Koberman was possibly meant to be the main horror, I also found Douglas’s dispassionate dissection rather chilling. “Why should it be bad? I don’t see anything bad. I don’t feel bad.”

I was behind schedule and had to listen to five in a row. I loved "Uncle Einar" and "There Was an Old Woman." Such good fun.

I didn't love 'The Scythe" though parts of it were thought provoking, as others have mentioned. I'm doing the Audible version and again, like others, the idea of Cro-Magnon in North America was a bit of a buzz kill.

“The Man Upstairs” and "The Wind" were both suitably creepy for October. I loved how even the sound of the silver fork was an issue for the Vampire-type creature. The idea of the same wind/storm system blowing for years and gaining strength and intelligence as it killed people was very handled effectively. But what kind of friend hangs up the phone and plays cards for hours while his buddy is having a meltdown?

>186 clamairy: I enjoyed “There Was an Old Woman” too. I love Aunt Tildy, a woman who knows what she wants and isn’t having any of your nonsense!

>187 Charon07: Right? She brought to mind Granny Weatherwax, and the sign she used to put on her chest, "I Ate'nt Dead!"

>188 clamairy: Yes!

>24 Charon07: "The Jar" episode that you remember from TV is also one I strongly remembered. However it wasn't Outer Limits. It was the Alfred Hitchcock hour of the early 60's. There were many excellent episodes in that series and they frequently get confused with Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes.

https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/The_Alfred_Hitchcock_Hour_-_The_Jar

>190 RBeffa: Thanks for straightening that out! I see a DVD is available.

>186 clamairy: "But what kind of friend hangs up the phone and plays cards for hours while his buddy is having a meltdown?" A bad one.

I thought the different sort of take on a vampire was fun in "The Man Upstairs", but Douglas is destined to be either a serial killer or politician.

>192 Karlstar: A bad one.

or one who has seen it before a hundred times

There Was an Old Woman

As Aunt Tildy might say, this was a hoot!! I love the idea of a quirky strong-willed old lady who just sort of 'let me speak to your manager's her way out of death, dying, becoming a ghost, etc. I'd move in with her! This story was a treat. Did anyone else get the notion Tildy was Irish? I'm not sure where that impression came from...

Some thoughts on "The Man Upstairs", and thanks to Karlstar for setting my mind spinning off in an entirely new direction.

The essence of this story initially seems to be one of Bradbury’s favorite themes – a young boy perceives an evil that adults cannot see and sets out to stop it. But he gives us notice, literally in the first sentence, that something is not quite right in this universe when he tells us that “Grandmother would fondle the cold cut guts of the chicken” as she eviscerated it.

Fondle?

You’re not a paragraph in yet, and you know somethin’ ain’t right here.

There’s no doubt that Douglas is – to put it mildly – a brat. He takes it upon himself to tell Mr. Koberman there are no vacancies in the boarding-house, apparently just because he doesn’t like the way the man looks. Once he discovers Koberman’s aversion to silver, he takes every opportunity to torment him with it. He purposely makes noise when Grandmother is gone and Koberman is sleeping – and this is all before the magical properties of the red glass allow Douglas to discover Koberman’s secret. So when Koberman purposely breaks the glass in a way that casts the blame (and subsequent punishment) on Douglas, it’s almost inevitable that the boy’s revenge is going to be carefully calculated and utterly devastating.

Bradbury’s given us a lot of open texture here, and strewn it with hints. Grandfather, talking with Douglas about the boy’s fascination with the preparation of the chickens, calls him “a cold-blooded little pepper” and notes that “you like to watch her cut ‘em.” We learn that Douglas’ father was “a military man” and that Douglas lived with him “before you came to live with us”. We don’t hear a peep about his mother, or why he now lives with his grandparents. A reader’s wandering mind could easily construct a whole backstory for this peculiar child that would make it easy to consider him an incipient sociopath – because I think one could make a pretty strong argument for that being the case.

We can infer, from the dinner-table conversation of the boarders, that there’s a connection between the reclusive Mr. Koberman and the recent spate of deaths and disappearances. But that really doesn’t seem to be what motivates Douglas in his final act of spite against him. He’s curious to know what Koberman’s innards really look like, and takes the most direct path possible to find out. And when it’s all over, he wants to show his grandfather something that’s “not nice, but it’s interesting.”

The reaction of the coroner and his assistants seem to be horror that Koberman existed, relief that he is now dead, and a sly admiration for the clever way Douglas administered the coup de grâce. They are glad that the monster is dead. But they don’t seem to understand that a monster is still among them.

>195 LyndaInOregon: Excellent analysis! One of the things that has impressed me with these stories is that even the simple ones have layers and the layers are well developed. Truly masterful short stories.

Corrected the post reference.

>195 LyndaInOregon: Thank you for sharing! I always appreciate your analysis. You've pointed out something I only parsed the barest whispers of. They don't seem to understand that a monster is still among them. Well said!

>195 LyndaInOregon: As the others have said, thank you. I was more than a little disturbed by the idea of a child welding a kitchen knife with little self-restraint. In this case there was a good result, but what happens if he accidentally mistakes another tenant for something inhuman.

Had to finish the book a week early as I got a copy from the library that had to be returned. I have read The October Country before, so this was a reread. I loved it the second time as much as the first. I think my favorite story is The Man Upstairs. Is the hero of the story really a hero? What a creepy kid!

Here we are, nearing the end of our journey through October Country. Three stories this week, including another visit with Uncle Einar's family. Here are the stories that wrap up this group read:

"The Cistern"
"Homecoming"
"The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone"

I hope you've enjoyed this journey as much as I have. The company has been wonderful!

I just read The Cistern and loved it. I wont say anything right now cept I in a way I very much related to Anna

Just finished "The Homecoming" and found it a sweet and sad tale about a boy who finds himself odd-man-out in his very unusual family. Uncle Einar (before his unfortunate accident) makes a strong appearance here.

There's really no horror here, but there's an ineffable sadness about not belonging, which Bradbury has tackled from time to time.

Cistern:

This story was so atmospheric. That's generally a strength of Bradbury's anyway, but I really felt like I was sitting in the room with these sisters, listening to this story. I think it would make a great live performance/short play. It was so eerie, but (and maybe this is just me) I didn't see the ending coming until the 'she's me!' line.

Some cisterns truly are like cities under cities. I invite anyone unfamiliar to look at Istanbul's Basilica Cistern to see what I mean. The idea of two dead people who are animated by the water, in love but bound to the flow of rainfall... It was very evocative. I enjoyed this story.

The main character in "The Homecoming" made me think of Marilyn Munster on the TV show The Munsters - the only one who wasn't a monster & she was pitied for that inadequacy by the family, although to "regular" folks, she was a beauty.

oh wow, thats perfect! I didnt care for the story that much; heres another 'scape goat' in a family that is so mistreated even his uncle isnt much help. but now that I think about it, it makes much more sense

>200 LyndaInOregon: Thanks very much for organizing this read. This was my first time reading The October Country and I enjoyed it very much.

Thanks to all for the great insights.

I think of the last three, I enjoyed "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" the most. Not a horror story in any way, more of a success story.

The Homecoming:

Although this story was very sad, I still enjoyed it. I think one of the themes I enjoyed here was about the social aspect that informs what a disability is. From the text, we don't get any confirmation about if Timothy really is terminally ill, or if he's simply a mortal human; to the family and the society he exists in, these are fundamentally the exact same thing.

There are some conditions in this world that are not always considered disabilities by those who have them, but affect these individuals differently because of how our society is set up. For example, ADHD: A Hunter in a Farmer's World argues that in a hunter-gatherer society, ADHD was not a disability, but a boon, and that it is primarily because of how our society has developed & functions that ADHD has become a disability.

Did you know some dogs have dyslexia? It's true; they've discovered it in brain scans. I don't know whether or not my dog has dyslexia; it doesn't affect his life in any way observable to me whether he has it not because dogs, unlike humans, don't live in a literate society. If humans didn't, either, we may never have known dyslexia even existed, or we might have considered it something minor like a personality difference. I'm a creative person, Sarah is introverted, Jim is dyslexic. A minor quirk, a difference in how the brain works, but not a disability. I have something called dysmusia. It's like dyslexia, but affects sheet music instead of words. Does that sound fake? If you haven't heard of it before, it might, but it's true. Is that a disability? Technically it's the same disparity as dyslexia, but critically, I don't need to read music to function in our society. It caused some awkwardness in music class, it forced me to quit band early when my ability to memorize the pieces I was supposed to play was outstripped by the complexity of music I was supposed to be reading, but that's really it. So, I wouldn't call it a disability.

Even if Timothy's terminal disease is simply being a normal, mortal human, it is a disability in this story. He is ignored by his peers and teased by his siblings because of it, he is prevented from forming meaningful connections. Of course his mother loves him, but at the end of the day, he will die before her, and she will have to visit his grave. She also seems to have a lot of difficulty understanding or connecting with her own son because of his disability. He goes up to bed crying, wondering if he will live to see the next Homecoming where he will be ignored again.

The story was tragic, but it was so, so real, and that's why I really enjoyed it.

>203 GraceCollection: me too! I just finished The Cistern and thoroughly enjoyed it.

>194 GraceCollection: yes, There Was An Old Woman was a hoot. I think I know people who would try and retrieve their body in a similar manner being as tenacious. What a kick!

Im so glad I finally read this book, and really wasnt scared (well, next in line was a little troubling)I esp appreciated all of the feedback and different interpretation that we all had. We need to do this another time; maybe another of his stories that we havent read?

>210 cindydavid4: Dandelion Wine. It’s been on my bookshelf for years waiting to be read.

ah I have read that but so long ago that I cannot find memory of it except pleasant thoughts. Id read that again

I really liked Dudley Stone. The idea of dying in order to live, of killing the old self in order to live a different life... I would rather be a living man than a dead author. It was all very thought-provoking, although I fear I don't have many original thoughts to add to it...

Thank you everyone, this read has been wonderful. I really liked that we were reading short stories, so we came up with something new each time and (for the most part) I wasn't tempted to read ahead.

I enjoyed this read-along. Seeing folks’ thoughts about the stories made them more enjoyable, and I certainly got more out of the ones I’d have been tempted not to pay much attention to.

>207 GraceCollection: Great, great analysis of "The Homecoming". I would have never thought of it in that light (and I doubt Bradbury did, either), but your comparisons were absolutely spot on.

Finished "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" this afternoon, and it's the only one of the collection of which I have absolutely no memory. How odd. Apparently it didn't make much of an impression on me in any of my multiple re-reads of this collection.

So ... was Strange a coward who gave up too easily? Or was he grasping at a fortuitous exit from a career which he feared was teetering on the brink of extinction? I couldn't help but think here of Harper Lee, who virtually disappeared from publication after 'To Kill a Mockingbird'.

Sigh. I almost hate to come to the end of this; it's been such fun, both to re-visit the stories and to read all the insightful commentary you folks have been kind enough to share.

I'd be game to participate in another, but will let someone else make the selection and lead the discussion. New energy and new ideas always help keep things fresh!

Apologies again, work kept me from contributing.
The Small Assassin I've read this many times because I have it in several different collections. You find Bradbury's stories turning up over and over again, both in different short story collections and in novels made up from what were originally short stories (e.g. The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine. These novels were called "fix-ups" within the Science Fiction community. I believe the coinage is from author A. E. van Vogt).

"The Small Assassin" was in Dark Carnival and made the cut for The October Country. It was the title story of a UK-only '60's collection of Bradbury's horror fiction. So it's clearly a story Bradbury thought well of. I can imagine him thinking he'd hit on a strong, original idea.

Surprisingly, it was included in A Memory of Murder, the 1984 collection of early crime stories, all but two of which had not been reprinted since their orginal magazine printings. It is, looking at it one way, a quirky crime story with a novel murderer. But it also has a foot in the science fiction camp, there was already a history of supermen or super-powered or super-evolved mutants in the science fiction pulps.

Turning back to the crime angle, the story has a distinctly 1940s Noir-ish paranoia about it that had a Gothic element to it too - especially the first part of the story that focuses on Alice.

>217 housefulofpaper:

Oh, I suppose I should say something about the ending. On thriller terms it's very effective, with the doctor coming to a full realisation and that ending with a callback to near the start of the story. Morally it's awful. There's not even a reason to think the baby is going to super-evolve, he might "just" have developed early, and there should be every hope that he could be rehabilitated.

The Crowd

This is one of Bradbury's stories that perhaps feels like a conventional Twilight Zone type story - modern US setting, a "what-if" idea that's developed so that we can sense the walls closing in on the protagonist.

But if the Joel Lane essay is correct, Bradbury is the pioneer of this kind of tale.

Of course I've read how dangerous those old cars were, with no crumple zones, no seatbelts, etc.

Jack-in-the-Box

I didn't remember this story which on the one hand suggests it's not memorable, on the other permitted me to approach it like a first reading.

I had the sense of the house as a Gormenghast squashed down into a small house (relatively small - bigger than anywhere I could ever hope to live in, but small in comparison to, say, Blenheim Palace).

I wrote earlier that I read Something Wicked This Way Comes this month as well, so Bradbury's view of childhood (in a nutshell, it's the best time of your life as long as you're free to run about in an idyllic 1920s small town) was at the front of my mind. It did illuminate this story even though it didn't really need it - the Jack-in-the-Box analogy is pretty direct. It did make more sense of Edwin's laughing as well as crying at the end of the story.

The Scythe

Ray Bradbury must have memories of the Great Depression. His family left Illinois for California when he was a child, which I suppose goes some way to explain his deep nostalgia for small town America. And the story was written in the middle of WW2.

>157 GraceCollection:
After reading your comment I was kicking myself for not noticing about the old world crop.

Uncle Einar

From Ray Bradbury's 1999 introduction to The October Country: '""Uncle Einar" is a love story. I so loved my favorite loud, brash Swedish uncle that I named and wrote a story about him, adding wings'.

The Wind

This one feels closer to the horror comics of the '40s and '50s, the infamous EC Comics and the per-super hero stories from the likes of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko (EC Comics loved Bradbury, by the way, and plagiarised some of his stories (which he apparently forgave or even found flattering - in any case he worked with them afterwards). The fact that EC Comics used him does show that, take away the heightened language and the psychological insights, some of these stories do end with, as it were, an animated corpse at the door in the final frame.

The idea of the wind (all winds) originating in a remote Himalayan valley also makes me think of Steve Dtiko's horror or weird stories (he went on to create the Marvel character Doctor Strange).

>216 LyndaInOregon: I almost hate to come to the end of this;

It doesnt need to, Dandelion Wine or Martian would all work. just need to pick an anthology and go for it! or those of us who are familiar with his stories could put together a list to read.

The Man Upstairs

Another protagonist whose freedom to act is restricted - a good Gothic staple of course.

I think if you wanted to suggest the unfathomably otherworldly or very advanced alien technology around the time this was written, the design go-to was geometric shapes.

It's not made clear if Mr Koberman is a supernatural vampire, or an alien with vampiric appetites.

Some stained glass features in one of the Martian stories, too. It makes you wonder if it goes back to a genuine childhood memory.

There was an Old Woman

Is the formidable New England spinster a stock character? It feels like I've seen characters somewhat like Aunt Tildy in many examples of popular culture (mainly old films and TV) but I don't feel as confident in my deep knowledge of US culture as I thought I was, when it comes to the test of talking to actual Americans about it.

I did enjoy this, the contrast of what felt like folkloric representations of death (or, Death) with modern (read: mid 20th Century) industrialised and bureaucratic attitudes to death. I don't want to make heavy weather of it though, it was "the funny one" and served to lighten the mood as we enter into the final few stories. Which, although not all light-hearted, did seem to overall have a different mood - on this re-read of the book at any rate (which made me a bit surprised to see that the story was in Dark Carnival, and in more or less the same position in the table of contents, even though that book ends with "The Next in Line").

The Cistern

This was another story that I'd forgotten, and for most of it I wondered if actually was a story at all. It seemed like a morbid prose poem that harked back to the fin de siecle decadents (who in fact had a toehold on the West Coast well into the 20th Century - George Sterling, his protege the young Clark Ashton Smith, for example - and, according to a recent YouTube upload by Stephen E. Andrews, a clear influence on the genre of Weird Fiction. The image of the dead lovers flowing out to sea and returning to their resting places in the city's underground drainage system and amongst the detritus and rubbish - it's a somewhat Baudelairian image but too sentimental, really. But then the story proper starts, nearly at the end of the page count, with an EC Comics style shock ending (that's not a slight - EC Comics were good and in their way sophisticated, but direct and - because they were visual storytelling - gory in a way Ray Bradbury's language throws a veil over (the idea I was trying to articulate or coming at from a different angle when I wrote about "The Wind" yesterday).

Homecoming

The Touchstone went to an illustrated edition of this story. I think I bought it as a birthday or Christmas present for one of my nieces some years ago. I wish I had my own copy.

"Homecoming" (referring to the ISFDB again) was written before "Uncle Einar" and that presumably explains why he is a rather more ghoulish figure in this story.

Bradbury apparently had intended to write many stories about this family of monsters living under the radar in modern America, obviously pre-dating The Addams Family and The Munsters.There was eventually a "fix-up" novel late in Bradbury's career, From the Dust Returned but from memory the separate stories didn't seem ever to quite jell into a fully coherent whole. The US hardback had a cover painting by none other than Charles Addams himself (it was reproduced in at least one US paperback edition).

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone

I do remember not appreciating this story the last time I read The October Country. Looking for actual horror or at least something macabre, this paean to the active over the contemplative life, if not life over death, seemed out of place and a kind of refutation all the previous stories.

I don't feel that way, this time anyway, although anyone looking for chills - despite the threat of murder in the story Dudley Stone tells - would probably feel a bit let down.

I suspect it's because I read Something Wicked This Way Comes as well. The language in the story feels a bit looser, as it does in the novel (a bit later - 1962). And the novel - I hope this isn't a spoiler - also comes out on the side of life over death. Another connection that I realised was the childhood friendship of Dudley Stone and John Oatis Kendall prefigures that of Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade in the novel.

Finished writing about the book - with 8 minutes of October left!

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone was my favorite of the last three. I found The Cistern much too morbid and The Homecoming quite depressing.

Thanks for inviting us to join in. I'm sure I'll be back for more.

Just finished the book. The Wonderful Death Dudley Stone was a good way to end this collection. The author kills himself in a sense. What better way for a book to end?

Great fun this was! Thanks for letting me join in on the conversations.

So this was fun last year. Does anyone want to do another Halloween read along for Oct 2025? I have a couple of appropriate books on my shelf that have been waiting for years for me to read. Here are my suggestions:

* Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
* Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison
* Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
* Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allen Poe
* The Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
* The Dunwich Horror & Others by HP Lovecraft

Reading anyone of these would contribute to decreasing my TBR pile of books.

Would love to participate, and would be up for any of these. I loved Dandelion Wine, but I'm a Bradbury freak. Any of these would be fun as an October group read.

>231 Neil_Luvs_Books: & >232 LyndaInOregon: I would like to participate as well.

>232 LyndaInOregon: >233 clamairy: ok, there are three of us at least so that makes a reading group. Looking back at last year’s read along I see that we are starting a little late: last year we took two months, Sep and Oct. That’s fine I think we can still do it in one month. So if you have left the choice to me, I’ll simply choose the shorter book: Rosemary’s Baby. There are 22 chapters (Part I with 10 chapters, Part II with 10 chapters, and Part III with 2 chapters). The book is only 245 pages long. So let’s do a chapter every weekday (MTWThF) and if we start on Oct 1 that will take us to Oct 30 reading about 11 pages per weekday. Of course it is permissible to binge read on the weekend, but no posting on a particular chapter until that chapter day.

Does that sound good to you? If it does, I’ll set up a new reading group for us in the science fiction LT group and post a link here for you to join. I’ll also post the reading schedule by day and date.

Let me know if you think this will work!

Hmmm. We could also start a couple weeks earlier than Oct (say Sep 22) and do half Part I one week, and 2nd half the next with Part III the wk of Halloween rather than doing a chapter a day. That might be easier. Let me know your preference.

I would be interested in doing a book club again this year! I had a lot of fun with this last year.

I personally am not very interested in Rosemary's Baby, but I might give it a second try if everyone else's heart is set on it. I think another short story collection would work better, and I'm not opposed to the book club going into November if we can't fit everything in before then! My vote would be for Poe or Bradbury, as I have generally been a big fan of their work. I would have to seek out a copy of Dandelion Wine, but I have a copy of The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe.

I have a pretty packed October (The European Grand Tour has France as a theme for October and there is so much I want to read, plus a tough work schedule) but would like to be in another group read. With the caveat that I might not finish "in time".

Like >236 GraceCollection: I'm not interested in Rosemary's Baby, primarily because I've read it before and I'm not going to do a re-read. Of the others, I should be able to get hold of copies of the Bradbury, Poe and Lovecraft books. They're all on my TBR so I'm not fussed, but considering my schedule a shorter one might be preferable.

I read Rosemary's Baby 50 years ago and I am not sure I want to read it again. I would be more likely to join in for a read of Dandelion Wine or The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Ok, instead of Rosemary’s Baby we will read The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I have set up a read along at this URL in LT:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/373792

I would have done Dandelion Wine but my copy does not have a table of contents and no chapter numbers or titles so it was going to be more work than I was willing to do to get that set up. Next year, hopefully someone else will do that for us.

We start on Monday, Oct 6 so that gives you plenty of time to secure yourself a copy of the book.

Just an FYI - there are two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (maybe even three or four). I have a 1961 paperback and I also read, in 2020, the version that was redone after the hit movie with Donald Sutherland. I gave the later version 4 stars and thought it quite good. I barely remembered the earlier version that I read as a teen. The later version is probably what most people would find.

Have fun! I won’t be able to join as I can not get hold of a copy of Body Snatchers.

>239 Neil_Luvs_Books: Both editions are written by Jack Finney, correct?

Edited to add: This audiobook is free if you have an audible subscription.

>242 clamairy: Finney wrote both versions. On reddit I found this: check the second paragraph of the first chapter. If the author says the story starts on August 13, 1953, that's the original text (it's October 28, 1976 in the revised text). I think the original edition is referred to as The Body Snatchers because that is the bold lettering, however just above it are the words "The Invasion of"



wikipedia says:
First edition
Finney, Jack (c. 1955). The Body Snatchers. New York: Dell Publishing.
Finney, Jack (1955). The Body Snatchers. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
Revised edition
Finney, Jack (1978). The Body Snatchers. New York: Dell Publishing.
Photonovel
Finney, Jack (1979). The Body Snatchers. Los Angeles: California: Fotonovel Publications. It features 350 color stills from the 1978 remake

>242 clamairy: >240 RBeffa: I did not know there were two editions. The one I have at home indicates copyright by Jack Finley for the years 1954, 1955 & 1978. So I think I have the revised edition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Snatchers

I was able to find PDFs available to borrow to read when I googled “invasion of the body snatchers pdf.”

This will be interesting if we begin reading and discover that some of us have different books!

>243 RBeffa: check the second paragraph of the first chapter. If the author says the story starts on August 13, 1953, that's the original text (it's October 28, 1976 in the revised text).
Thank you for finding this information, I'm sure it will prove helpful. Can someone let me know if the plan is to read the version that says August or the one that says October, so I can scan for the difference before I commit to the one I will buy/loan?

Thank you Neil, for setting us up on this. Looking forward to reading with you all!

>245 GraceCollection: I have been assuming that we would read the more recent edition published in 1978. That is, the one that says October.

And just to remind folks that the discussion will be at this URL where I have posted the reading schedule.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/373792