Sixty years ago, in 1955, Ray Bradbury published The October Country. The book has become a classic of American gothic horror, but it didn’t start out that way.
Many of the stories were originally featured in Bradbury’s first-ever book, Dark Carnival, which had a very limited release and went out of print soon after. At the Paris Review, Sam Weller explores the way Bradbury reworked his first book into something even better:
The October Country is a more refined work than its predecessor: the revised stories are stronger, more mature, and more taut, and the later collection contains a lean nineteen stories, cut down from the twenty-seven originally published in Dark Carnival.
