Ray Bradbury's second short story collection is back in print, offering chilling encounters with funhouse mirrors, parasitic accident-watchers, and strange poker chips. Both sides of Bradbury's vaunted childhood nostalgia are on display, in the celebratory "Uncle Einar," and haunting "The Lake," the latter a fine elegy to childhood loss.

This edition features a new introduction by Bradbury, an invaluable essay on writing, wherein the author tells of his "Theater of Morning Voices," and, by inference, encourages you to listen to the same murmurings in yourself.

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 and nightmares; a woman's newborn child can plot murder; and a man's 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 there is astonishing beauty in these shadows, born from a prose that enchants and enthralls.