The October Country

Back in October 2022, I started reading this Ray Bradbury collection. I thought it apropos for October-season. Well, I read the first three and half stories in the nineteen story collection and I put the book down for a year. I have tried to read Ray Bradbury several times in my life – the earliest in the early 1990s when I had Something Wicked This Way Comes and I could never bring myself to read very far in it. I eventually just got rid of that book in defeat. I do not dispute that Bradbury is an interesting author with skill. He is incredibly well-known and well-read and is usually considered among the greats of speculative fiction writers and American writers. So, here’s me with another unpopular opinion; I learned such things from Nabokov:  Bradbury is not an author who’s writing works well for me.

The Dwarf • (1954) – (3 stars)
The Next in Line • (1947) – (2 stars)
The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse • (1954) – (1 stars)
Skeleton • (1945) – (1 star)
The Jar • (1944) – (3 stars)
The Lake • (1944) – (1 stars)
The Emissary • (1947) – (2 stars)
Touched with Fire • (1954) – (3 stars)
The Small Assassin • (1946) – (1 star)
The Crowd • (1943) • (3 stars)
Jack-in-the-Box • (1947) (1 star)
The Scythe • (1943) (1 star)
Uncle Einar • [The Elliott Family] • (1947) – (2 stars)
The Wind • (1943) – (4 stars)
The Man Upstairs • (1947) – (2 stars)
There Was an Old Woman • (1944) – (3 stars)
The Cistern • (1947) – (1 star)
Homecoming • [The Elliott Family] • (1947) – (3 stars)
The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone • (1954) – (3 stars)

I read the first story, The Dwarf, and was not overly impressed. It just seemed mean-spirited (more on this later).  However, the story is not bad. Surprisingly, when I glanced around online, it seemed many readers understood the ending to be different than I understood it.  I read the ending a few more times and I just am confused about what other readers may have seen that I did not.  Regardless, its not that great of a story and I was not really enthused to keep reading.

I read the second story, The Next in Line, in the collection and I liked it a lot because it really played on the tension between the main characters.  I liked the atmosphere and the setting.  Ultimately, though, the horror is domestic/psychological. I liked a bunch of elements in the story, I thought this was original.  It just went on way too long. I felt this was unending. Maybe this story would be best as a TV episode or a short film.  It just took the effort out of me. I liked the sugar skulls and the mummies, the vehicle troubles added to the tension. There was just too much of this whole thing.

By the time I got to the third story, The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse, I was quite exasperated. This story is stupid, do not read it. Somehow, some way, I got through this one and began Skeleton. I read halfway and abandoned the book. Skeleton ruined my reading experience – it is a terribly stupid story (in my opinion).  It goes on too long, the characters are all witless, the ending is something a middle-schooler would come up with.  Of course, it took me a year to find out about the ending, because I was so put off by the whole book already.

The Jar is an interesting story. Again, the feeling I have about Bradbury stories is that the real horror is the pyschological/human horror, if you will, even though this usually occurs among elements of the standard horror ingredients. The Jar involves a carnival and a weird, disgusting whatever in a jar of strange liquid. It takes place somewhere rural and folksy. The story is superficially about the jar and its contents. In reality, the story is a character study of the main character, Charlie, and his desire to be popular and important.  The horror is the length Charlie will go to in order to keep his perceived amount of “prestige.”  This is a good story, finally.

The Lake, The Cistern, The Small Assassin, Jack-in-the-Box are the stories that I rated so low – a one-star. I know some folks will argue with me about this. Heck, they may be correct – but whatever they mete out to punish my reviewing skills, please do not make me re-read these stories!  All of these stories feel endless – they go on far too long. They grew really tedious and boring, especially The Cistern. I could not be more disinterested in a story, I think.  Now, the Small Assassin seems like some trope, but its stupid. Babies. I cannot even write more about this story – just no, forget it.  The Lake was similarly pointless and it had zero suspense because it is completely predictable and the take-away is null.  Now, Jack-in-the-Box is slightly different because I feel like there are so many potentials here that are wasted. There are twisted plot elements, euphemisms, fantasy-level world-building, etc.  Somehow though, it does not all stitch together nicely, and this includes the actual toy jack-in-the-box in the story.  Definitely an interesting story, the whole does not add up to enough and the ending is predictable.  I probably could bump the rating of this one up a star, but at the same time, I know I did not enjoy it as I was reading it. It just feels like it had fragmentary goodness and then also scenes of stupidity.

The Scythe is the story that I think most readers are familiar with.  It also gets high ratings from readers. I was so annoyed by it that I really read it faster than I should have.  The idea is rather straightforward, I wonder that no author has explored this concept? The idea is that the wheat fields and the reaping done with the special scythe represent the actual reaping of people who die in the world. Except the characters are toxic and unlikeable. And then Bradbury heaped on a rather gruesome fire. Again, I am not sure why the writing does not work for me, but I have zero sympathy for the characters and the stories all seem so boring or obvious.

The Wind is my favorite of the collection.  This was another that I felt was well-done and was less about the character-traits and why lurks in people’s psychologies as opposed to having an actual horrific element that the story is about. Sure, the one character spends some time pondering people and their lives, but at the end of the day, the fierce wind is anthropomorphized. The ending is bittersweet. I am glad I read this because I like the courage and friendship I see in the story.

For the most part, the stories in this collection are not exactly horrific, but rather they are uncomfortable.  They are stories about people and their psychological drives.  I do think that the majority of the stories have a meanness to them that I find off-putting. The characters are not people I want to know.  The dialogue is caustic.  The characters are mean. I do not really like anything in these stories, though I can appreciate some of them.  Bradbury does a huge amount of wordsmithing. By this I mean that he likes to write prose-poetry, he likes to play with descriptions, and so many segments of his stories have unusual wordplay. I gave Touched With Fire three stars not because I loved the story, but it was definitely the most suspenseful. Much of that suspense is built with the descriptive wordsmithing that Bradbury uses to draw the reader into the scenes.  Including his term “irritable murder” – which I think is a neat term that I have to consider as I continue in my horror-genre reading and my Big Crime Reads.  In this story, Bradbury’s style worked. It was immersive and interesting. However, most of the time, it backfired and Bradbury’s writing style annoyed me.  Like in The Cistern where I could not believe how long the thing was drawn out with all the words and words and words.

Truthfully, I can understand why some readers love these stories. I can see how some readers would rate this book so highly.  I am not saying those folks are wrong, but Bradbury just does not resonate with me. His stories chafe and bore me. I get restless and disinterested in reading his work. That being said, I am glad, in a way, that I was finally able to finish any Bradbury book in my lifetime.  These are stories that, if pressed, I will think of like Friends titles, i.e. The One with the Sugar Skulls, The One with the Dog, The One with the Skeleton, etc.  I think mainly writers who want to write in the horror/speculative fiction genre need to read through these stories carefully and decide what works and what does not. The general reader may or may not like this collection, I have no idea, since my opinion on this one seems vastly divergent.

2 stars