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. The Dwarf - in which the owner of a Hall of Mirrors and a young carnival-goer observe a dwarf who uses the mirrors to make himself seem taller. That's so creepy. It is though, isn't it! Also, not especially PC. Once in a lifetime anyway, it’s nice to make a mistake if you think it’ll do somebody some good, she said.

One thing I have to mention, because I've seen it in numerous Bradbury books now, is Bradbury excessively repeating himself! What...is..up...with...that? It's like he's trying to make everything sound like an echo, or pad his word totals so he can get his work to a publishable length. He often repeats entire sentences, not just individual words. Why didn't any of his editors mention it or remove these repetitions? It's really, really annoying...especially since he does it about a hundred times per book. Here are some examples: Granted, Bradbury's style does take some getting used to - the man is emotionally honest and as people everywhere become more emotionally guarded, such honesty appears to be naivete. It isn't, but that's an argument for another day. And Bradbury occasionally enjoys being poetic or lyrical, so people marking time until they can rush through volume #17 of "Lilith McHotpants, Ace Ghoul Slayer"; "Part the Twelveteenth of the Saga of Kaaarfgaaasr", and "P is for Perfunctory" or whatever they spend the majority of their time "reading" may find such a style annoying. Because, you know, it's about evoking feelings and such - not pushing buttons. The Lake is another touching and sad story, but in another way - it's about a man who revisits his childhood home and is flooded with memories of a lost friend. It's almost a ghost story, but not quite - the ghosts are the memories which flood the main character to the point where he almost re-enters the past, and feels disconnected from - and disappointed with - the present reality.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 Dwarfs 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. There Was an Old Woman is another of the rare stories with a touch of humour, with a colourful elderly lady as a heroine who refuses to accept the inevitability of Death, and is ready to fight to the last breath and beyond for the right to stay in this world as much as it pleases her. Similarly, I didn't really get the fall/October feeling from the vast majority of these stories. I think he described fall things like rustling leaves on the ground or the biting wind or the way the grass turns colour in one or two stories, maybe three or four, but that was it, out of nineteen stories. So I didn't really get scared or into the fall mood from this collection, which was a real letdown. Uncle Einar" is, of course, not really a horror story, more of a weird tale in that fine old tradition. It's also one of his stories about "The Family" that eventually influenced Charles Addams. It's probably the slightest of those Family stories (Cecy's story, "The Traveler" is really dark!) and I've never read Bradbury's late-in-life reworking of this material into a novel-form, because I feel so close to "Homecoming" and The Family, et. al (having discovered them at exactly the right moment of my childhood). But this one is a wonderful bit of dark fantasy, touching and sweet.

A wonderful short story about a man hunted by a wild. Not only kind of wind, a predatory kind that takes the souls from its victims. Very well written and quite convincing in the matter it was told! For most of the story, this man communicates with his best friend on the phone and the tension is established by the fact we are not certain of his sanity. Maybe he is imagining everything?I just went and bought me a new hat, she said, smiling. "Gosh, I feel good! You know why? Billie Fine’s sending a mirror out tomorrow! Can’t you just see the nice little guy’s face?" The Cistern is a sort of twisted romance spiced by the fear of drowning. A woman gazes out a window at a rainy city landscape and imagines the water draining into subterranean tunnels, filing them up a carrying along the bodies of strangers. Otro gran cuento del libro se llama "La guadaña", en el que un hombre y su familia arriban a una cabaña escapando del hambre. Allí encuentran que un viejo ha muerto y les ha cedido todas su posesiones y una portentosa guadaña con una inscripción que dice 'Quien me maneja, ¡Maneja el mundo!' Podrán darse cuenta hacia dónde se orienta la narración... Skeleton" - That is gross man! LOL! A darkly humorous story. OK, this one is a bit horrifying. I love it!

Another story that Bradbury carried over from Dark Carnival to The October Country was a lightly revised version of “The Lake,” which he had written in 1942, at the age of twenty-two. “The Lake” was a significant breakthrough for the writer early in his career. “I realized I had at last written a really fine story,” Bradbury wrote in his 1989 book, Zen in the Art of Writing. “The first in ten years of writing. And not only was it a fine story, but it was some sort of hybrid, something verging on the new. Not a traditional ghost story at all, but a story about love, time, remembrance, and drowning.” I had been writing about living. Now I wanted to live. Do things instead of tell about things. [...] We've lived every way there is to live, with our eyes and noses and mouths, with our ears and hands. 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 typewrite

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The October Country is many places: a picturesque Mexican village where death is a tourist attraction; a city beneath the city where drowned lovers are silently reunited; a carnival midway where a tiny man's most cherished fantasy can be fulfilled night after night. The October Country's inhabitants live, dream, work, die--and sometimes live again--discovering, often too late, the high price of citizenship. Here a glass jar can hold memories and nightmares; a woman's newborn child can plot murder; and a man's skeleton can war against him. Here there is no escaping the dark stranger who lives upstairs...or the reaper who wields the world. Each of these stories is a wonder, imagined by an acclaimed tale-teller writing from a place shadows. But there is astonishing beauty in these shadows, born from a prose that enchants and enthralls. Ray Bradbury's The October Country is a land of metaphors that can chill like a long-after-midnight wind...as they lift the reader high above a sleeping Earth on the strange wings of Uncle Einar. The Next In Line highlights the fear of the cemeteries, of the dark, damp and smelly place undergound where the dead are buried. A young couple on a tourist visit to Mexcio comes across a town where the air is so dry that bodies do not rot in the ground and are instead mummified. Because a lot of the local people are too poor to pay for the burial place, these mummies are exhumated and stored in a long underground chamber and then shown to the tourists for a small fee. I have saved a quote from this story, where the young man chides his wife for being superstitious, but I have a hunch that the author sides with her on the issue, as sometimes the fear is too strong for the rational brain:

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. Skeleton is fear of illness, of your own body. It is the tale of a hypochondriac who goes to a dubious doctor and becomes aware that he has been walking around all his life carrying a skeleton inside him. Delightfully macabre.

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Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2023-04-04 11:13:19 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Boxid IA40894814 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Fall is probably my favorite of all seasons, and every year I walk on the streets, through avenues and parks. There is a smell of burning leaves hanging around lazily, and the skies are still bright, sharp and clear, but the sun is less warm. You can feel the wind getting colder and taste the air, now sharper and fresher. Nights are chilling, with big yellow moons. Leaves change their colors and are now a mixture of yellow, green, red and orange. They start dropping from the trees one by one at first, but steadily gusts of wind grasp them by the handfuls and leave bare branches behind. Although the process is inherently sad in nature as it forecasts the upcoming winter, with its ice and snow, there is an element of beauty in fall leaves on the ground, especially in the afternoon sunlight. It casts a special shine which is not there in other seasons, and yellowing leaves make the streets look as if they were paved with gold.