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The October Country: Stories Mass Market Paperback – April 12, 1985
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This classic collection features:
The Emissary: The faithful dog was the sick boy’s only connection with the world outside—and beyond . . .
The Small Assassin: A fine, healthy baby boy was the new mother’s dream come true—or her worst nightmare . . .
The Scythe: Just when his luck had run out, Drew Erickson inherited a farm from a stranger; and with the bequest came deadly responsibilities . . .
The Jar: A chilling story that combines love, death . . . and a matter of identity in a bottle of fear.
The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone: A most remarkable case of murder—the deceased was delighted . . .
Plus fourteen more unforgettable tales!
“An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation.”—The New York Times
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDel Rey
- Publication dateApril 12, 1985
- Dimensions4.14 x 0.84 x 6.85 inches
- ISBN-10034532448X
- ISBN-13978-0345324481
- Lexile measure780L
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From the Inside Flap
THE SMALL ASSASSIN: a fine, healthy baby boy was the new mother's dream come true -- or her nightmare . . .
THE EMISSARY: the faithful dog was the sick boy's only connectioin with the world outside -- and beyond . . .
THE WONDERFUL DEATH OF DUDLEY STONE: a most remarkable case of murder -- the deceased was delighted!
And more!
From the Back Cover
THE SMALL ASSASSIN: a fine, healthy baby boy was the new mother's dream come true -- or her nightmare . . .
THE EMISSARY: the faithful dog was the sick boy's only connectioin with the world outside -- and beyond . . .
THE WONDERFUL DEATH OF DUDLEY STONE: a most remarkable case of murder -- the deceased was delighted!
And more!
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Aimee watched the sky, quietly.
Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights. The concrete pier empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like insects in the air above the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various carnival pitches stood, like melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly, not talking, all down the line.
Two customers had passed through an hour before. Those two lonely people were now in the roller coaster, screaming murderously as it plummeted down the blazing night, around one emptiness after another.
Aimee moved slowly across the strand, a few worn wooden hoopla rings sticking to her wet hands. She stopped behind the ticket booth that fronted the MIRROR MAZE. She saw herself grossly misrepresented in three rippled mirrors outside the Maze. A thousand tired replicas of herself dissolved in the corridor beyond, hot images among so much clear coolness.
She stepped inside the ticket booth and stood looking a long while at Ralph Banghart’s thin neck. He clenched an unlit cigar between his long uneven yellow teeth as he laid out a battered game of solitaire on the ticket shelf.
When the roller coaster wailed and fell in its terrible avalanche again, she was reminded to speak.
“What kind of people go up in roller coasters?”
Ralph Banghart worked his cigar a full thirty seconds. “People wanna die. That rollie coaster’s the handiest thing to dying there is.” He sat listening to the faint sound of rifle shots from the shooting gallery. “This whole damn carny business’s crazy. For instance, that dwarf. You seen him? Every night, pays his dime, runs in the Mirror Maze all the way back through to Screwy Louie’s Room. You should see this little runt head back there. My God!”
“Oh, yes,” said Aimee, remembering. “I always wonder what it’s like to be a dwarf. I always feel sorry when I see him.”
“I could play him like an accordion.”
“Don’t say that!”
“My Lord.” Ralph patted her thigh with a free hand. “The way you carry on about guys you never even met.” He shook his head and chuckled. “Him and his secret. Only he don’t know I know, see? Boy howdy!”
“It’s a hot night.” She twitched the large wooden hoops nervously on her damp fingers.
“Don’t change the subject. He’ll be here, rain or shine.”
Aimee shifted her weight.
Ralph seized her elbow. “Hey! You ain’t mad? You wanna see that dwarf, don’t you? Sh!” Ralph turned. “Here he comes now!”
The Dwarf’s hand, hairy and dark, appeared all by itself reaching up into the booth window with a silver dime. An invisible person called, “One!” in a high, child’s voice.
Involuntarily, Aimee bent forward.
The Dwarf looked up at her, resembling nothing more than a dark-eyed, dark-haired, ugly man who has been locked in a winepress, squeezed and wadded down and down, fold on fold, agony on agony, until a bleached, outraged mass is left, the face bloated shapelessly, a face you know must stare wide-eyed and awake at two and three and four o’clock in the morning, lying flat in bed, only the body asleep.
Ralph tore a yellow ticket in half. “One!”
The Dwarf, as if frightened by an approaching storm, pulled his black coat-lapels tightly about his throat and waddled swiftly. A moment later, ten thousand lost and wandering dwarfs wriggled between the mirror flats, like frantic dark beetles, and vanished.
“Quick!”
Ralph squeezed Aimee along a dark passage behind the mirrors. She felt him pat her all the way back through the tunnel to a thin partition with a peekhole.
“This is rich,” he chuckled. “Go on—look.”
Aimee hesitated, then put her face to the partition.
“You see him?” Ralph whispered.
Aimee felt her heart beating. A full minute passed.
There stood the Dwarf in the middle of the small blue room. His eyes were shut. He wasn’t ready to open them yet. Now, now he opened his eyelids and looked at a large mirror set before him. And what he saw in the mirror made him smile. He winked, he pirouetted, he stood sidewise, he waved, he bowed, he did a little clumsy dance.
And the mirror repeated each motion with long, thin arms, with a tall, tall body, with a huge wink and an enormous repetition of the dance, ending in a gigantic bow!
“Every night the same thing,” whispered Ralph in Aimee’s ear. “Ain’t that rich?”
Aimee turned her head and looked at Ralph steadily out of her motionless face, for a long time, and she said nothing. Then, as if she could not help herself, she moved her head slowly and very slowly back to stare once more through the opening. She held her breath. She felt her eyes begin to water.
Ralph nudged her, whispering.
“Hey, what’s the little gink doin’ now?”
They were drinking coffee and not looking at each other in the ticket booth half an hour later, when the Dwarf came out of the mirrors. He took his hat off and started to approach the booth, when he saw Aimee and hurried away.
“He wanted something,” said Aimee.
“Yeah.” Ralph squashed out his cigarette, idly. “I know what, too. But he hasn’t got the nerve to ask. One night in this squeaky little voice he says, ‘I bet those mirrors are expensive.’ Well, I played dumb. I said yeah they were. He sort of looked at me, waiting, and when I didn’t say any more, he went home, but next night he said, ‘I bet those mirrors cost fifty, a hundred bucks.’ I bet they do, I said. I laid me out a hand of solitaire.”
“Ralph,” she said.
He glanced up. “Why you look at me that way?”
“Ralph,” she said, “why don’t you sell him one of your extra ones?”
“Look, Aimee, do I tell you how to run your hoop circus?”
“How much do those mirrors cost?”
“I can get ’em secondhand for thirty-five bucks.”
“Why don’t you tell him where he can buy one, then?”
“Aimee, you’re not smart.” He laid his hand on her knee. She moved her knee away. “Even if I told him where to go, you think he’d buy one? Not on your life. And why? He’s self-conscious. Why, if he even knew I knew he was flirtin’ around in front of that mirror in Screwy Louie’s Room, he’d never come back. He plays like he’s goin through the Maze to get lost, like everybody else. Pretends like he don’t care about that special room. Always waits for business to turn bad, late nights, so he has that room to himself. What he does for entertainment on nights when business is good, God knows. No, sir, he wouldn’t dare go buy a mirror anywhere. He ain’t got no friends, and even if he did he couldn’t ask them to buy him a thing like that. Pride, by God, pride. Only reason he even mentioned it to me is I’m practically the only guy he knows. Besides, look at him—he ain’t got enough to buy a mirror like those. He might be savin’ up, but where in hell in the world today can a dwarf work? Dime a dozen, drug on the market, outside of circuses.”
“I feel awful. I feel sad.” Aimee sat staring at the empty boardwalk. “Where does he live?”
“Flytrap down on the waterfront. The Ganghes Arms. Why?”
“I’m madly in love with him, if you must know.”
He grinned around his cigar. “Aimee,” he said. “You and your very funny jokes.
A warm night, a hot morning, and a blazing noon. The sea was a sheet of burning tinsel and glass.
Aimee came walking, in the locked-up carnival alleys out over the warm sea, keeping in the shade, half a dozen sun-bleached magazines under her arm. She opened a flaking door and called into hot darkness. “Ralph?” She picked her way through the black hall behind the mirrors, her heels tacking the wooden floor. “Ralph?”
Someone stirred sluggishly on the canvas cot. “Aimee?”
He sat up and screwed a dim light bulb into the dressing table socket. He squinted at her, half blinded. “Hey, you look like the cat swallowed a canary.”
“Ralph, I came about the midget!”
“Dwarf, Aimee honey, dwarf. A midget is in the cells, born that way. A dwarf is in the glands. . . .”
“Ralph! I just found out the most wonderful thing about him!”
“Honest to God,” he said to his hands, holding them out as witnesses to his disbelief. “This woman! Who in hell gives two cents for some ugly little—”
“Ralph!” She held out the magazines, her eyes shining. “He’s a writer! Think of that!”
“It’s a pretty hot day for thinking.” He lay back and examined her, smiling faintly.
“I just happened to pass the Ganghes Arms, and saw Mr. Greeley, the manager. He says the typewriter runs all night in Mr. Big’s room!”
“Is that his name?” Ralph began to roar with laughter.
“Writes just enough pulp detective stories to live. I found one of his stories in the secondhand magazine place, and, Ralph, guess what?”
“I’m tired, Aimee.”
“This little guy’s got a soul as big as all outdoors; he’s got everything in his head!”
“Why ain’t he writin’ for the big magazines, then, I ask you?”
“Because maybe he’s afraid—maybe he doesn’t know he can do it. That happens. People don’t believe in themselves. But if he only tried, I bet he could sell stories anywhere in the world.”
“Why ain’t he rich, I wonder?”
“Maybe because ideas come slow because he’s down in the dumps. Who wouldn’t be? So small that way? I bet it’s hard to think of anything except being so small and living in a one-room cheap apartment.”
“Hell!” snorted Ralph. “You talk like Florence Nightingale’s grandma.”
She held up the magazine. “I’ll read you part of his crime story. It’s got all the guns and tough people, but it’s told by a dwarf. I bet the editors never guessed the author knew what he was writing about. Oh, please don’t sit there like that, Ralph! Listen.”
And she began to read aloud.
“I am a dwarf and I am a murderer. The two things cannot be separated. One is the cause of the other.
“The man I murdered used to stop me on the street when I was twenty-one, pick me up in his arms, kiss my brow, croon wildly to me, sing Rock-a-bye Baby, haul me into meat markets, toss me on the scales and cry, ‘Watch it. Don’t weigh your thumb, there, butcher!
“Do you see how our lives moved toward murder? This fool, this persecutor of my flesh and soul!
“As for my childhood: my parents were small people, not quite dwarfs, not quite. My father’s inheritance kept us in a doll’s house, an amazing thing like a white-scrolled wedding cake—little rooms, little chairs, miniature paintings, cameos, ambers with insects caught inside, everything tiny, tiny, tiny! The world of Giants far away, an ugly rumor beyond the garden wall. Poor mama, papa! They meant only the best for me. They kept me, like a porcelain vase, small and treasured, to themselves, in our ant world, our beehive rooms, our microscopic library, our land of beetle-sized doors and moth windows. Only now do I see the magnificent size of my parents’ psychosis! They must have dreamed they would live forever, keeping me like a butterfly under glass. But first father died, and then fire ate up the little house, the wasp’s nest, and every postage-stamp mirror and saltcellar closet within. Mama, too, gone! And myself alone, watching the fallen embers, tossed out into a world of Monsters and Titans, caught in a landslide of reality, rushed, rolled, and smashed to the bottom of the cliff!
“It took me a year to adjust. A job with a sideshow was unthinkable. There seemed no place for me in the world. And then, a month ago, the Persecutor came into my life, clapped a bonnet on my unsuspecting head, and cried to friends, ‘I want you to meet the little woman!’ ”
Aimee stopped reading. Her eyes were unsteady and the magazine shook as she handed it to Ralph. “You finish it. The rest is a murder story. It’s all right. But don’t you see? That little man. That little man.”
Ralph tossed the magazine aside and lit a cigarette lazily. “I like Westerns better.”
“Ralph, you got to read it. He needs someone to tell him how good he is and keep him writing.”
Ralph looked at her, his head to one side. “And guess who’s going to do it? Well, well, ain’t we just the Saviour’s right hand?”
“I won’t listen!”
Product details
- Publisher : Del Rey; 1st edition (April 12, 1985)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 034532448X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345324481
- Lexile measure : 780L
- Item Weight : 6 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.14 x 0.84 x 6.85 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #195,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #89 in Science Fiction Short Stories
- #421 in Science Fiction Anthologies (Books)
- #10,904 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91, inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.
Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, "Live forever!" Bradbury later said, "I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped."
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
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Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2017
The Dwarf--3 stars--a woman tries to help a little person being bullied by her coworker at the pier carnival, with disastrous results.
The Next in Line--4 stars--husband and wife on a vacation in Mexico visit the mummies in the local cemetery: people whose families can't afford to pay the rent on their graves. After seeing them lined up in the catacomb a rift grows between the husband and wife, and slowly undoes them. Classic descent-into-madness story.
The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse--3 stars--a short, comedic satire about one conventional man's obsession with the young intelligentsia.
Skeleton--5 stars--A man at war with his own skeleton. The ending is priceless, and though the premise is absurd, I found myself having had the same strange thoughts at one time or another in my own life.
The Jar--4 stars--A farmer buys a freakish specimen suspended in a jar to impress his neighbors at home, who gather nightly to speculate on what it might be. I loved that the different guesses of the townsfolk were stand-ins for our different ways of seeing the world. Also, Bradbury is such a master of descriptive prose.
The Lake--4 stars--Childhood friends separated, but not forever, by death. Poignant and beautiful.
The Emissary--5 stars--One of my favorite stories. The dog of a bedridden boy roams the outside world and brings back the smells of everything on his fur. Sometimes too, the dog brings the boy companions, both welcome and strange.
Touched with Fire--3 stars--Short story about two old men who try to help a cantankerous woman undesirous of interference. Funny and entertaining.
The Small Assassin--2 stars--I'm never a huge fan of stories about mothers and fathers whose babies are out to get them.
The Crowd--5 stars--Lovely, intriguing, creepy premise about the people who crowd around car accidents.
Jack-in-the-Box--4 stars--A recluse mother and her boy, who doesn't know that he's a recluse. She's raised him to think that the house is the universe, the different stories and rooms are countries and lands, and that out in the trees and beyond them, there are beasts who would rend the boy to pieces. More beautiful descriptions, though modern readers will probably feel that this story has been done many times.
The Scythe--3 stars--Bradbury's take on the Grim Reaper.
Uncle Einar--4 stars--A man with wings has a mid-life crisis.
The Wind--3 stars--A man is persecuted by the wind. (In this story as in all of Bradbury's stories, the speculative element is used to enhance the humanity of the characters--this story is actually about friendship, and the guilt of not being there for your old friend when he needs you most)
The Man Upstairs--4 stars--Delicious sinister story about a boy and the new mysterious boarder in his grandmother's house.
There Was An Old Woman--5 stars--An old woman who sees the man in black coming for her, and refuses to die. Aunt Tildy is a wonderfully drawn, hilarious character.
The Cistern--4 stars--A short but beautiful love story about two dead people in the sewer.
Homecoming--5 stars--This is the kind of story I remember loving Bradbury for. A family of vampires, (sort of, they drink blood but have other fantastic talents as well), has a reunion. Unfortunately for Timothy, the only human member of his family, the reunion brings to life all of his embarrassment and longing. Again, the story is about what it's like to be 14-years-old, couched in the great creativity of Bradbury's fantastic descriptions and characters.
The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone--4 stars--Not really speculative, but a meditation on literary success and failure. The characters reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and as always the imagery was vivid and beautiful.
But more than that, there's the imagination and heart that Bradbury was so known for, and no story better unifies those ideas than the wonderful "Homecoming." A favorite of Neil Gaiman's (and the influence on Gaiman's world is evident), "Homecoming" tells the story of a family of monsters - vampires, ghosts, and more - coming together for a family reunion, all told from the perspective of the one "normal" child in the family. It's sweet, heartbreaking, and ends on an optimistic and heartfelt note that made me smile. Or take "The Emissary," about a young boy, confined to his room because of sickness, who experiences the world entirely through his roaming dog and the visitors he brings home - a story that opens with wonder and heart, slowly turns to heartbreak, and then becomes terrifying. And that's not all - once you add to the collection some stories that show off Bradbury's rich sense of humor - the elderly woman who refuses to die in "There Was an Old Woman," or the ridiculous satire of trend followers that is "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" - and you have a wonderful collection that reminds you what made Bradbury so special.
Top reviews from other countries
I would compare Ray Bradbury stories to those of Shirley Jackson(The Lottery etc.).