Review of the Day Ray Bradbury’s The October Country

This collection of stories might be called quiet horror; for Bradbury the things we fear most are often the things we have hidden within ourselves. One story I especially enjoyed was "The Lake". In the story a young boy named Harold spends the final day of summer at the beach where his childhood friend, Tally, drowned the previous year, leaving a sandcastle unfinished in her memory. Years later, Harold comes back and discovers a small, perfectly formed sandcastle on the shore alongside the body of a young girl that has finally washed up after twelve years. It seems Tally has "returned" to finish the sandcastle, and he says a final goodbye to his childhood. At least in my opinion, the story captures the moment a child first understands death.

Here are a few lines I liked:

I am married, I thought. I have a wife and a life in the city, and I am a man who should not be looking for ghosts. But I have come back here to see a ghost that doesn’t exist, except in my own mind. I have come back to see a beach that is no longer the beach I knew, and a girl who is no longer a girl. The water is the only thing that is the same, and it is the same water that took her away from me.

I was twelve and she was twelve. But the lake took her and it kept her twelve, while I went on and turned thirteen and fourteen and finally twenty-two. I grew tall and my voice changed and I learned things that a boy of twelve doesn't know. But Tally stayed the same, down there in the cold and the dark, waiting for me to catch up or for the world to stop turning.

I’ll  be back here every year. I’ll walk the beach and I’ll look for you, Tally, even though I know you are gone. I will remember the way you laughed and the way the water looked in your hair. But I’ll never find you, not like this, never again in the sunlight. I will go back to my wife and my life, and I will leave my childhood here on the sand where it belongs.