October Belongs to Ray Bradbury: Introducing a Month on October Reads

“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys,” writes Ray Bradbury. It’s the first line of his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, ostensibly a horror novel, but not really. October isn’t really a rare month, though. With 31 days, it’s more abundant than plenty of others, and it always comes around once every 12 times. But when you remember that in a good year, when a wind storm doesn’t blow them all away on the first of November, the leaves only really turn for three or four weeks, and soon you’re going to wake up to frost on the grass, October does start to seem a little special. For this October, The Town Crier will be visiting the books we come back to every October, or at least every second or third or fifth October, because life is busy and we can’t read as much as we wish we could. I didn’t know if October was a month when other people pulled their old favourites off the shelf. Maybe for some that’s December, July, or April. But it’s always when I set aside my overlong To Read list and read some of the books in my increasingly large collection associated with October: Something Wicked This Way Comes, The October Country, The Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Magic Prague, and on and on. For The Town Crier this month, I asked a number of past Puritan contributors and other writers what books they read every fall, or felt they associated with the month of October. For some, October is about preparing for a season of darkness and depression. For others, it’s about rediscovering your purpose before the wildness of the holiday season sets in. For me, it’s about ghosts and shadows and books that read like candy. I have a terrible sweet tooth and I’ve had to live through too many mid-terms to ever read cod-liver-oil books in October again. Chills of joy run down my spine when the wind rattles the branches. I wake up feeling excited when I see that it’s raining, and the clouds are so thick it’s clear the sun won’t come out that day. There aren’t many passages I’ve ever read that have lit up my imagination more than Bradbury’s self-written epigraph to The October Country:

… that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where the noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and the midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain …

That, I thought, sounded just right to me.The passage, I remember reading (though where now I can’t find), was from a story called “Dark Carnival,” which Bradbury deliberately withheld from The October Country. It would take years and go through many title changes, including Jamie and Me and The Autumn People, but it would finally become Something Wicked This Way Comes, a story about a carnival that comes to Green Town, Illinois, the week before Halloween. Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Theatre blows into this mid-century, Midwest pastoral town at three a.m. on an ancient train to the tune of a calliope with no player. The tent poles set themselves up and pull their tent from the storm clouds in the sky. Only two boys, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway witness this fiendish arrival and soon discover its other dark deeds. This carnival finds its sideshow acts in every town it visits, offering youth or age to the boy who yearns to become an adult or the old man who hungers for a carefree summer's day, and transforming them into The Dwarf or The Skeleton or The Dust Witch when they beg to brought back. Ringmaster Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, tempts these lost souls with his sinister carousel, which adds or sheds a year with every circle it makes backward or forward. The two protagonists, Jim and Will, are both 13 and only a week from turning 14. Jim is eager to grow up, become a tall, strong man of 20, ride the carousel and knock out the thuggish Mr. Cooger who can lift each boy up with a single hand. Only Will sees the cost of giving up boyhood too quickly. Jim is the one keen to play Peeping Tom in the plum tree where they once caught a couple having sex—their first exposure to carnal acts in a pre-Internet-porn, Rockwellian American town. At the age of 13, I was much more like Jim. I’d given up on Halloween or reading fantasy and horror novels for getting high, playing video games, and the incredibly out-of-reach prospect of girls. But if they ever did exist, I doubt there are too many boys left like Will—loyal, curious but cautious, and not too eager to grow up too fast. Something Wicked This Way Comes is not so much a horror novel as it is a boy’s coming-of-age story, but it’s one where the cost of failure means aging prematurely and giving up your soul for the privilege. Aging too fast means becoming one of the “autumn people,” who come from the dust, go to the grave, and who have no blood in their veins, but are only stirred by the night winds. “What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What hears with their ears? The abyss between the stars,” pontificates Will’s father, Charles Halloway. It’s his lengthy speeches in the library, just before the novel’s climax, that make philosophical the differences between monsters and humans. The way Charles Halloway talks, you might think autumn people are demons or vampires one moment, and in the next you wonder if they aren’t just adults, or people who suffer from depression, or people who have made mistakes in their lives.Whenever I have a chance to step back and reflect on things, most of my thoughts are autumn thoughts: dying, aging, failing, disappointing, losing friends to time and distance. It takes a lot of work for me to convince myself that things are going well, even when they are, and especially when the sun is shining. But when it rains for three days straight in October, and the yellow leaves are the only bright things in all the grey, I feel like all the world is as gloomy as I am, and like an autumn person, I feel glad to be alive.