The Jar”, “The Lake”, “The Emissary” and "The Scythe" are stand outs that contain humor, terror, loss, love and wistful longing for the past in equal parts. I was surprised by “The Small Assassin” which is the creepiest post-partum depression story I have ever read, and really freaked me out. The little ambiguous note with which each tale concludes feels like Bradbury giving me a wink and a self-satisfied giggle as I hide my face behind my scarf after reading the last sentence. The man was a truly virtuoso at playing with his readers’ emotions. The Scythe" - Don't fear the Reaper, or don't fear the reaping. This story left a singularly eerie image in my mind after reading. Edwin is a strange child in a strange house with a strange mother. The large house is his world — his mother will not permit him to venture out beyond, where the great beasts killed Edwin’s father before he was born. Edwin knows only the house, knows only mother and teacher, and he never sees them together. Then one day, it all changed, terrifyingly and wondrous. The Man Upstairs is a variant of the fear of the stranger, about supernatural predators living amonst us, disguised as ordinary people. What makes the story special is the young age of the narrator, a young boy whose curiosity and inventivity solves the mystery. Word of the day from his grandfather: There's just so many memorable tales that I won't forget in a hurry! The Small Assassin, which is about a mother who is convinced that her newborn baby is out to kill her. The Scythe, a chilling tale about a man who comes into the possession of a powerful wheat field and an even more powerful scythe. The Lake (which was my other favourite story) is about a man revisiting his childhood home and recalling a friend who drowned in a lake during their childhood.

En las Vísperas de todos los Santos, se produce una "Reunión de familia", que es un tierno cuento sobre el reencuentro de más de cien familiares. Obviamente, están todos muertos. Think how wonderful for him, Ralph, having one in his own room any time he wants it. Can I use your phone? The October Country is a 1955 collection of nineteen macabre short stories by American writer Ray Bradbury. It reprints fifteen of the twenty-seven stories of his 1947 collection Dark Carnival, and adds four more of his stories previously published elsewhere. Obsession is a major theme in many of these stories. In “The Small Assassin,” a young woman named Alice Leiber becomes convinced that her newborn baby intends to kill her: “I am being murdered before their eyes. These doctors, these nurses don’t realize what hidden thing has happened to me. David [Alice’s husband] doesn’t know. Nobody knows except me and – the killer, the little murderer, the small assassin” (p. 152). Martin knew it was Autumn again, for Dog ran into the house bringing wind and frost and a smell of apples turned to cider under trees…Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, sawdust from fresh-cut cordwood…No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!”She saw ten thousand cold white images of him stalking down the glassy corridors, between mirrors, his mouth straight and his fingers working themselves. An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation."-- The New York Times As with many of Bradbury’s stories, the path to publication of “The Homecoming” is a narrative in itself. In late 1945 or early 1946, he submitted the story to Mademoiselle on a gamble: though “Homecoming” was a stretch for the fashion magazine, Mademoiselle was known at the time for publishing top-quality fiction, and Bradbury was just beginning to think about publishing beyond the pulp-fiction market where he had earned a following. The story landed in the magazine’s slush pile, where it eventually caught the eye of a reader in the office, another young writer who was also coming into his own, named Truman Capote. Capote had recently published the story “Miriam” in the magazine and was helping out around the editorial offices when he discovered “Homecoming.” Editor George Davis and fiction editor Rita Smith (Carson McCullers’s sister) were also keen on it and sent Bradbury (misspelled as “Bardbury”) an acceptance on March 27, 1946, via Western Union, with an offer of four hundred dollars. Davis hired New Yorker artist Charles Addams to create a drawing to accompany the story, and Davis and Smith built the entire Halloween-themed October issue around “Homecoming.”

Skeleton” – weird story where a man’s own skeleton seems to have a separate consciousness. Only a writer like RB could pull this off. The Next in Line recites my terror of being trapped in Mexico, in a corridor of mummies I hope never to see again. The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse - Oh my giddy aunt - in which a totally boring guy becomes a mascot for a bunch of avant garde bohemians precisely because he is boring but then he osmoses into a fantastical creature much stranger than any of them, with a false leg with a birdcage set into it, and a monocle made out of a poker chip on which Matisse had painted an eye – this is from memory so don’t sue me – but when I read it I had no idea who matisse was – story blew my head off.Ray Douglas Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947. So far, i havent read anything by Ray Bradbury that i dont like. If youre looking for something perfect to get you into autumn, this author is who to turn to. I often find that the very essence and of the autumn season hangs on Bradbury's every word. A dark and eerie foreboding in all of his books that ive come to love and recognize as Bradbury's writting. This one was no different. This collection of stories is no different. The words used and the worlds created are impeccable. Unfortunately... with a rare few of these stories... the pathways running through those beautiful worlds are... kinda dumb. And every one of them ends abruptly. Which can work for some of the stories but is a little jarring for the others. 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. The October Country is a more refined work than its predecessor: the revised stories are stronger, more mature, and more taut, and the later collection contains a lean nineteen stories, cut down from the twenty-seven originally published in Dark Carnival. It opens with a description of Bradbury’s phantasmagoric milieu: