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 introduction suggests this one's a good choice for a Halloween read, and indeed the stories selected for the present collection may not all happen in October, but they do share a melancholic mood that often morphs into full blown fright. I am thinking of adding as a subtitle High Anxiety for the whole set and then play a game of 'Name That Fear' for each episode: The Lake" - The first overtly supernatural tale in this book, a sentimental and sad little ghost story.Homecoming" - "They're creepy and they're kooky, Mysterious and spooky" - actually may be more like "The Munster". This is an absolutely brilliant story about two men who having retired from selling life insurance study human psychology and thus discover that people often cause their own death- in an unconscious way. They want to help one lady, but as it turns out, some people are beyond help. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone ends the book not with another scare but with an affirmation of life, an invitation to get our noses out of books and run around in the sun. Dudley Moore was a very promising young writer who decided decades ago to renounce his literary career and fade into oblivion. In the present time, he invites a reporter to tell him all about that past decision and the reason for his seclusion: It was just one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you…”

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. 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. The nineteen stories brought together by Bradbury and published in 1955 as The October Country share that delicious-chill, twist-ending quality that many of us who grew up in the latter half of the 20th century associate with television series like The Twilight Zone. If the genre of dark fantasy in a modern American setting feels familiar to us now, courtesy of writers like Rod Serling and Richard Matheson and Ira Levin and Stephen King, perhaps it is in part because Ray Bradbury did so much to popularize it. 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 Scythe" - Don't fear the Reaper, or don't fear the reaping. This story left a singularly eerie image in my mind after reading.The October Country contains nineteen very different stories, most of which were previously published in Bradbury's debut colection, Dark Carnival. These are some of Bradbury's earliest stories, published before The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. There is a special pleasure in reading these stories - allowing Ray Bradbury's gentle storytelling lull us in and expose us to his imagination. I can see young Kings and Mathesons of this world reading his fiction deep into the night, possibly even with a flashlight under the bedcovers, amazed that a grownup could think such things onto paper. Bradbury was a man who could both turn a phrase and had a great, big heart - his warmth emanates from his writing, which is far removed from the vulgarity of contemporary world. Bradbury was often accused of being too sentimental and too emotional, but I don't think this is completely correct - while it's true that his stories offer a bucolic vision of the American heartland and the nostalgia of small-town life, but didn't shy away from showing the nastiness running behind the curtain of these idealistic visions. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone:A most remarkable case of murder—the deceased was delighted . . .