The October Country - 9780063445338

An expansive collection of 19 short stories from legendary science fiction and fantasy pioneer and National Book Award winner Ray Bradbury, now with a strikingly beautiful new cover design.

Welcome to what Ray Bradbury deems the “undiscovered country” of his imagination. The nights are long in this country. The cold hours of darkness move like autumn mists, leading the way deeper and deeper toward an inevitable winter. But the moonlight reveals great magic and a breathtaking vista of fabulous ideas, outlandish concepts, unexplored notions, and otherworldly conceits—the creative landscape of America’s premier short fiction writer.

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 or nightmares; a woman’s newborn child can plot her murder; and a man’s own 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 of shadows. But an astonishing beauty is born of the darkness—and of prose that enchants and enthralls. Ray Bradbury’s The October Country can chill like a long-after-midnight wind . . . as these stories lift the reader high above the sleeping Earth on the wings of fantasy.