Every so often I feel the need to wax glowing on a classic - rediscovered - tome, and this month's train-reading selection is Ray Bradbury's 1956 collection of short stories, The October Country. It's a splendid book, featuring "Skeleton," "The Jar," "The Small Assassin," "The Next in Line," and "The Emissary," about a lonely, bedridden boy whose faithful dog one night retrieves something...unexpected. Every time I read one of these timeless tales, I'm astounded by their clarity of melodic description and grasp of the horrific in the otherwise mundane, as in this excerpt from "The Next In Line," the sinister story of an American couple vacationing in rural Mexico in late October:

It was several mornings after the celebratory fiesta of El Dia de Muerte, the Day of the Dead, and ribbons and ravels of tissue and sparkle-tape still clung like insane hair to the raised stones, to the hand-carved, love-polished crucifixes, and to the above-ground tombs which resembled marble jewel-cases. There were statues frozen in angelic postures over gravel mounds, and intricately carved stones tall as men with angels spilling all down their rims, and tombs as big and ridiculous as beds put out to dry in the sun after some nocturnal accident. And within the four walls of the yard, inserted into square mouths and slots, were coffins, walled in, plated in by marble plates and plaster, upon which names were struck and upon which hung tin pictures, cheap peso portraits of the inserted dead. Thumb-tacked to the different pictures were trinkets they'd loved in life, silver charms, silver arms, legs, bodies, silver cups, silver dogs, silver church medallions, bits of red crape and blue ribbon. In some places were painted slats of tin showing the dead rising to heaven in oil-tinted angels' arms.

Looking at the graves again, they saw the remnants of the death fiesta. The little tablets of tallow splashed over the stones by the lighted festive candles, the wilted orchid' blossoms lying like crushed red-purple tarantulas against the milky stones, some of them looking horridly sexual; limp and withered. There were loop-frames of cactus leaves, bamboo, reeds, and wild, dead morning-glories. There were circles of gardenias and sprigs of bougainvillea, desiccated. The entire floor of the yard seemed a ballroom after a wild dancing, from which the participants have fled; the tables askew, confetti, candles, ribbons and deep dreams left behind.

What happens in October? Why, reaping, of course...as in the Grim Reaper. If you'd like to find out more, may I direct you to the official Rad Bradbury website, and its companion Ray Bradbury Message Board - a very interesting forum. May I also suggest reading "Skeleton," accompanied by a snack - a bag of fresh, crunchy breadsticks. Just to stay in practice.

---