(Ever the perfectionist, Bradbury was, throughout his career, often discontent with calling a book done, even after its publication.) He rewrote a number of stories, made light revisions on others, cut twelve tales altogether, and added four new ones to round out the collection. When given the chance to rerelease the out-of-print collection in 1955, Bradbury seized the opportunity to revisit his first book and correct the things he deemed inadequate. In 1955, Ballantine Books published the now-classic collection of Bradbury’s gothic horror, The October Country, which celebrated its sixtieth anniversary on October 25, and many of the stories in the collection are reworkings of tales from Dark Carnival. Besides a pricey limited-edition reprint in 2001, Dark Carnival exists as a literary apparition.Īnd yet many people have read some of Dark Carnival without knowing it. There’s good reason few readers, even those well versed in Bradbury’s work, are unfamiliar with Dark Carnival: Arkham House, a small press out of Sauk City, Wisconsin, published the book in a modest run of 3,112 copies the book went out of print just a few years later. “The Dubliners of American Gothic”-that’s how Stephen King referred to Ray Bradbury’s first book, the little-known 1947 short-story collection, Dark Carnival. Ray Bradbury’s The October Country turns sixty.
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