Episode 10: The October Game by Ray Bradbury

Classic Ghost Stories

Tony Walker

Fiction, Drama, Science Fiction

4.9 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2019

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

#Ray Bradbury# Is the most modern author we’ve read so far in the #Classic Ghost Story# podcast. He was born in Illinois in 1920 and died in 2012 in Los Angeles.His most famous book is Fahrenheit 451 which he wrote as a young man in 1953. This story is set in a Dystopian future where books are burned and the fireman set any alight they find. The title is due to the temperature at which paper will catch fire.Bradbury hinted that Farenheit 451 was a warning against totalitarian states and state censorship. He wrote it during the McCarthy era. Otherwise Bradbury seems to have had pretty reactionary views.But we digress. He also wrote #horror stories# and The October Game features in a collection called The October Country. This is in fact a horror story. There’s nothing much supernatural about it but it is much anthologised in dark fiction collections. We suspect pretty soon what’s going to happen (though maybe not its full extent) and Bradbury has the skill to draw us in as spectators to the inexorable train wreck that we can see but not stop.The narrator is pretty much wholly unpleasant. Sure, he didn’t get a son but even that play for our sympathy soon palls when we begin to suspect what monstrous horror he is going to enact against an innocent just to pay back his vile rage and sense of entitled injustice. No, I didn’t like him. Even so it was only when they were in the cellar I began to suspect just how appalling his act was going to be.The story structure is masterful. It drives from beginning to end on one track. It never deviates, just builds up the fascinated appalled concentration on The Husband.Yuk. I’ll read something nicer next week. In fact I already have, but I wanted to make sure you had this horror for Halloween.If you were helpful enough to do some or any of these following things for me, I would be immensely grateful. I swear down I would.————————Share the Podcast to your friendsRate the Podcast on Apple or elsewhereBuy me a coffee via https://paypal.me/gospatric (Paypal)Sign up as a Patron for $1 a month to keep me going on http://www.patreon.com/barcud (Patreon) https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Support the show) (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The The October Game by Ray Bradbury.
0:30.9	He put the gun back into the bureau drawer and shut the drawer.
0:36.9	No, not that way. Louise wouldn't suffer.
0:39.9	It was very important that this thing have, above all, duration. Duration through imagination,
0:46.9	how to prolong the suffering, how first of all, to bring it about. Well, the man standing before the bedroom mirror carefully fitted his cufflings together.
0:59.8	He paused long enough to hear the children run by swiftly on the street below.
1:04.9	Outside this warm two-story house, like so many gray mice, the children, like so many leaves.
1:13.6	By the sound of the children, you knew the calendar day.
1:17.6	By their screams, you knew what evening it was.
1:20.6	You knew it was very late in the year, October, the last day of October, with white bone masks and cut pumpkins and the smell of
1:31.5	dropped candle wax. No, things hadn't been right for some time. October didn't help any.
1:40.9	If anything, it made things worse. He adjusted his black bow tie. If this was spring,
1:48.3	he nodded slowly, quietly, emotionally at his image in the mirror. Then there might be a chance.
1:57.4	But tonight, all the world was burning down in the ruin.
2:02.3	There was no green spring, none of the freshness, none of the promise.
2:09.1	There was a soft running in the hall.
2:12.1	That's Marion, he told himself, my little one.
2:16.4	All eight quiet years of her, never a word, just her luminous
2:21.0	gray eyes and her wondering little mouth. His daughter had been in and out all evening,
2:27.4	trying on various masks, asking him which was the most terrifying, most horrible. They had both finally decided on the skeleton
2:36.7	mask. It was just awful. It would scare the beans from people. Again, he caught the long
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Tony Walker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Tony Walker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.