The Wind is another candidate for 'best of' anthologies, very short but also very effective in the idea that destructive winds somehow achieve intelligence by absorbing the minds of their victims. The fear category in my game could be the anxiety over the unleashed forces of nature. El cuento que cierra el libro, "La maravillosa muerte de Dudley Stone", no narra la muerte física de ese personaje, sino de su muerte literaria y de cómo esta, paradójicamente lo mantuvo vivo el resto de sus días. The theme of this collection, as the title suggests, is autumn. As Neil Gaiman once said, Bradbury is to experienced in October and after reading three of his books as well as this short story collection, I quite agree. He seems to have loved this time of year as much as I do, as is evidenced by this "introduction" to The October Country: 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. The first story in the collection that is about the FAMILY. I loved reading about Cecy, a girl who spends her days in bed, but has great powers of mind. I enjoyed all the stories about the family, but it was only in the last one that I figured out who they really were.

My copy of The October Country has a new introduction by Ray Bradbury, written in 1999, where he claims to remembering being born and the development of his passion for stories and storytelling. He wrote his first story in the seventh grade, and since the age of twelve knew that was the way to ensure proper immortality - being remembered after our limited time on earth runs out. Bradbury saw the process of writing as a match between life and death, each completed story a victory. Days when he didn't write were threatening him extinction, and this is why he wrote every day since he turned twelve, evading death. He died last year, at the age of 91, having published his last novel - Farewell Summer - six years before, along with hundreds of short stories. Death has finally caught with Ray, but not before he had his say - he went out on his own terms, and achieved the exact type of immortality that he hoped for. She saw ten thousand cold white images of him stalking down the glassy corridors, between mirrors, his mouth straight and his fingers working themselves. 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: Along the way you discover you are alive—age twelve. Discover you can die—age fourteen. Plus the funerals of your grandfather and sister and a few friends, waking you up midnight.Where the crowd came from he didn’t know. He struggled to remain aware and then faces hemmed in upon him like the large glowing leaves of down-bent trees…How swiftly the crowd comes, he thought, like the iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere.” He let the silence lie awhile, and then got up, putting his finger-printed glass aside. Mind the booth for me? Dwarf" - A little strange, ends before it should for me, no clear denouement, but a good little morality tale.

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" is also, I fear, a bit slight for my tastes. It's a cute idea and, as expected, well-told, but the central idea - eh, too romantic an envisioning of a "writer as character" for my tastes. Finally, on the threshold of puberty, Mr. Electrico, the carnival magician, summoned me away from graveyards and funerals, touched me with the St. Elmo’s fire sword and shouted sound advice: Live forever!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. 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. It’s because I know he’s different, she said, looking off into darkness. It’s because he’s something we can never be—you and me and all the rest of us here on the pier. It’s so funny, so funny. Life fixed him so he’s good for nothing but carny shows, yet there he is on the land. And life made us so we wouldn’t have to work in the carny shows, but here we are, anyway, way out here at sea on the pier. Sometimes it seems a million miles to shore. How come, Ralph, that we got the bodies, but he’s got the brains and can think things we’ll never even guess? Despite the best advise from his doctor and his wife, Mr. Harris could not leave it alone until he found the strange, little M. Munigant and his terrible cure.

The Next in Line" - I like the gradation of depths for burial based on the wealth of the family. There is a very creepy, psychologically unsettling scene in the catacombs. I find the story goes on too long yet the ending is a little too abrupt (too "WTF" if you will). I do love the lyricism and poetic rhythm of his writing though. Skeleton - oh my ears and whiskers – this story was totally vomit inducing and also blew my head off, all about a guy who becomes convinced his skeleton is out to get him – great The October Country was Ray Bradbury’s first collection of tales. It’s the equivalent of a first pitch home run. Some of these stories are lyrically terrifying, others whimsical and funny. All delve deep into the human psyche, touching something essential.The Small Assassin" - My favorite story in this book, give me the collywobbles! I'm not saying anything about the plot!

This oppressively hot tale of summer heat, and frayed, homicidal nerves is excellent, but feels out of season in this October collection. She opened her purse slowly and took out a small roll of bills and started counting. Thirty-five, forty dollars. There. I’m going to phone Billie Fine and have him send out one of those tall-type mirrors to Mr. Bigelow at the Ganghes Arms. Yes, I am! 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.”Even more compelling, though, is a following paragraph in which Bradbury describes his compulsion to write, in a passage with which many comparably motivated writers might identify: Many of the stories deal with death—its certainty and the ways people react to this certainty. In “The Scythe,” a poor farmer inherits the job of Grim Reaper. Each day he must harvest blades of wheat that represent those scheduled to die. He tries to spare his family, but they are trapped between life and death. In his attempt to free them, he slashes wildly and indiscriminately at the wheat, thus beginning World War II. There are great stories with a touch of horror here, too. The Skeleton and The Small Assassin both have great, imaginative premises and work very well. The first one features a man convinced that his skeleton is out to kill him - and tries to fight it; it concludes with a great, memorable last line, true to style of classic short fiction. The Small Assassin is Bradbury's experiment with psychological horror - a woman becomes convinced that her newborn baby is conspiring to kill her. While this might seem to be just an example of postnatal stress and depression, the arguments she uses sound at least a bit true: is there anything in the world more selfish than a baby, with its unending demand for constant care and attention? Do some mothers (and fathers) do not have the feeling that sometimes their baby is acting the way it does just to spite and annoy them? This is a great horror story without vampires or boogeymen, but with cribs, nappies and milk bottles. The last line, again, is a killer - literally!