This is a collection of nineteen short stories, all of them focused on the “macabre,” which gives the book a pretty wide-range. Some of the stories are supernatural; others aren’t. Some of them are frightening; others are comedic. And, as is the case with most short story collections, some are good and some aren’t. I’ve never been as high on Bradbury as a lot of genre aficionados; I’ve always found him to be pretty inconsistent in terms of quality and this book accurately reflects that. There’s only a couple of stories here that I’d call bad; There Was an Old Woman is absolutely the worst. Most of them are just medium to good; some of them just feel a little pointless and others have good elements but don’t stick the landing. But when Bradbury is on target, he’s downright brilliant. The two best stories here are both near perfect little distillations of existential horror. In The Small Assassin, a new mother becomes convinced that her baby wants to kill her and, believe it or not, this rather ridiculous set-up is given a screw-tightening, dread-filled treatment that builds to one of the best final lines in the book. A lot of these stories, honestly, build to great final lines; The Emissary, a beautifully written story of a bedridden boy and his dog, has one of the most visceral. But in The Small Assassin, you kind of have an exploration of post-partum depression decades before anybody really admitted there was such a thing; it’s still bracing and disturbing today, so one can only imagine how brain-frying this story must have been in the 1950s. The best story is also the longest, The Next In Line, and it has an incredibly simple set-up; a married couple are on vacation in Mexico when the wife suddenly is stricken with a sense of impending doom. That’s . . . it. I mean, that’s kind of it. But Bradbury is at his best writing about morbid obsession; this is a theme that also runs through The Small Assassin obviously and also underlines Skeleton, a bizarre, but unsettling story in which a hypochondriac becomes fixated on the idea that he has a skeleton inside of him and he just. Can’t. Stop. Thinking. About it. That one goes a hair too far at the end, but the way Bradbury gets inside the head of this guy as he basically just gets existentially grossed out and hung up thinking about the inner workings of his own body is marvelously grim and darkly funny at the same time. There’s not a lot of the dark humor in The Next In Line; but grim, it certainly is. Bradbury captures the feeling of having a mind that is not entirely under your control, a mind that keeps flitting back to unsettling images and thoughts even as you try to distract it. And he’s getting at something about the inability to control emotions as well as this woman struggles with emotions that are anything but rational, but are persistent, upsetting and tormenting. The Next In Line is only the second story in the book and that might do the rest of the stories a bit of a disservice; The Small Assassin comes right about halfway through, so that final half feels increasingly insubstantial and the book has the misfortune to end on one of the weakest stories in the book, The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone, which isn’t bad, but just feels perfunctory and pointless. Still, taken as a whole, it’s a fun book of fantastic, macabre, often darkly comic, often genuinely disturbing stories. These stories have been mixed and matched over the years in countless collections, so there are probably better ones that have the great stories here and fewer of the weak ones, but who has the time to go through all of those Tables of Content? If you’re looking for more consistent genre short stories of the period, I’ve always been partial to Richard Matheson over Bradbury, but that’s not to say that Bradbury’s bibliography doesn’t have wealth to discover. As it is, The October Country is well-worth traveling. 3 stars.
tl;dr – short story collection is variable, as much of Bradbury’s work is, but there are a few genuine masterpieces here and, on the whole, the book is fun and engaging. 3 stars.