Books Completed October 2022

 

The October Country by Ray Bradbury - I read this every October. This year, for whatever reason, I was struck by how many of the stories really revolve around bad or damaged relationships, regardless of what weirdness is also going on.

• "The Dwarf" - The two non-titular characters have an abusive relationship. It's not clear if they're friends or dating, but the carnie belittles the woman at every opportunity.
  
• "The Next in Line" - The worst of them all. It's sort of the point of the story, but the husband in this one is just awful.
  
• "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" - The marriage is actually pretty okay, and they seem supportive of each other. But then the story is really about a sort of tug-of-war of exploitation between the main character and the hipsters.
  
• "Skeleton" - Guy's doctor hates him, guy's wife is mildly supportive but doesn't really seem to care about her husband starving himself to death and puking in the flowers.
  
• "The Jar" - Another one where it's the terrible relationship driving the plot. There's a veil over it but it's also heavily implied the husband kills his wife for cheating on him which... cool.
  
• "The Lake" - Seems to be going good then the whole marriage turns out to be hollow and perfunctory.
  
• "The Emissary" - Kid's mom is clearly exasperated with him being sick all the time. Half of the good relationship dies on page 3, and that absence drives the rest of the story.
  
• "Touched With Fire" - This one does not hold up well. The concept is relatable, with temperatures rising these days, but holy hell Ray poured every vile stereotype about women he could dredge up into the woman on floor 3.
  
• "The Small Assassin" - Almost! The husband actually seems to be taking his wife's concerns and stress seriously. Not quite enough to save her, though. And the doctor is in this one is, again, a twit.
  
• "The Crowd" - The only real relationship in this one is between two friends, and it's pretty believable actually.
  
• "Jack-in-the-Box" - Just 20 pages of screwed up mother issues.
  
• "The Scythe" - Pretty believable and supportive marriage, particularly when you consider what people will do to feed their kids.
  
• "Uncle Einar" - A straight-up happy marriage, with passages that dwell on how they bring out better things in each other. Nice! (For some reason I always picture Einar as Gilbert from The Sandman, but with wings.)
  
• "The Wind" - Two friends, one with a problem, and the other trying to support him. The latter's wife though berates him constantly for being concerned about his friend, and doesn't believe anything he says about the troubles. Nice trust setup there.
  
• "The Man Upstairs" - This is probably my favorite story in this book, it's extremely Bradburyish. There's the relationship between the main boy and his grandparents, which is loving in that kind of bemused way.
  
• "There Was an Old Woman" - It's the absence of relationships here at all that feels weird.
  
• "The Cistern" - Jesus.
  
• "Homecoming" - Probably my second favorite, and Einar's here again. The story centers around a normal boy's relationship with his monstrous family, and it's... sweet and sad at the same time. About as healthy as you can imagine.
  
• "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" - And they all lived happily ever after.

I found The Ray Bradbury Theater on streaming and watched a few episodes based on stories in this collection (The Crowd, Skeleton, and The Man Upstairs). The show does not hold up too well, to be honest.

The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury - Another one I read every October. It's a young adult book so it's not that much of an investment, but it's a fun little tradition. I don't know how well the history of Halloween presented here would hold up to modern theory and research, but I don't particularly care, it's a romp, and I love the illustrations by Mugnaini.

This has one of my favorite Bradbury lines, set off in a paragraph by itself: "The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile." However, I did notice on this reading that Ray could never pass up the opportunity to make a smile simile when describing scythes, I think there were four in this book alone, and he does it in "The Scythe" in the collection above, as well.

I looked up the animated movie after reading this, too. I didn't watch it because I remembered doing so a year or two ago and thinking it was pretty bad. I was surprised to read that Bradbury considered it one of the better adaptations of any of his work.

Hokushai, a Graphic Biography by Giuseppe Lantazi & Francesco Matteuzzi - This is a graphic biography of a man I admit I knew very little about at all. It was a birthday gift for my wife from a friend, so it was out on the table. It's also a brief history lesson on the Edo period. Nice art, well-told story, interesting framing. It did bust out the "samurai didn't use guns because they weren't honorable" chestnut though which makes me wonder how accurate the rest of the facts were. I did no additional research to find out.

The Goon Library Volume 1 by Eric Powell - I picked up 5 volumes of this on sale years ago, and pulled this one on a whim. I hadn't read any The Goon in a long time and was surprised how well it holds up. There's a lot of early-2000's "lolrandom" going on but if you get past that there's genuine pathos here, and fear sometimes and the art's great, and the core story is still just spot on. Plus you get "Release the giant zombie chimp!" Will probably dust off the other volumes soon.

The Willows and Other Nightmares by Algernon Blackwood - This is the very fancy Beehive Books edition, illustrated by Paul Pope. "The Willows" really is an eerie little tale and a good one to revisit around Halloween. It never sits quite right with me, though, how The Swede conveniently knows all this arcane knowledge.

 

This volume also contains "Accessory Before the Fact", "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House", "An Egyptian Hornet", and "The Man Who Found Out." I don't think I'd read those last two before - "The Man Who Found Out" is bleak.

A lot of care went into the production of this edition - it won some design awards when it came out. It very much feels like you are Reading A Book when you're reading this book. The illustrations are evocative, particularly given the vague and otherworldly nature of the subject matter, and are placed through the stories really well to not break the flow or spoil anything.