Review: The October Country

I'd read Fahrenheit 451 in school like many others, along with All Summer in a Day, and well, school being school, I didn't appreciate either at the time. I've been out of that mess for over a decade now and catching up on the classics.

Ray is the master of the hook (sometimes, it takes two sentences).

From The Scythe: "Quite suddenly, there was no more road."

From The Crowd:"Mr. Spallner put his hands over his face."

And the evil delight of, "Just when the idea occurred to her that she was being murdered she could not tell," from The Small Assassin. Give Chucky the killer doll a run for his money, Ray.

While some start benign, none of them felt that way for long. I was expecting slow burns, and some of them were, but the overwhelming sense of wrongness flowed straight into my brain and made me feel like I was going mad. He achieves this through lyrical, increasingly frenetic prose while his characters drive themselves insane. It was all there on the back of the book, his mastery of the human psyche, but nothing could prepare me for what was inside.

Not to say there weren't moments of joy or exuberance- once those did occur, it was as magical as the horror, even if it was immediately cut short. It was certainly strange, feeling catharsis when the rug was pulled out from me again, but it felt like life, no matter how outlandish some of the ideas became.

Months on, I still think about many of the stories, and this is as much as I can say about them without depriving you, the reader, of this masterclass of stories.(less)[edit]

5/5 domestic lizards (from the cover)

See the review on Goodreads!