Deborah
ENGL 3850-02N
Supernatural Lit
Dr. Coats
26 March, 1998
Don't Go Takin' My Heart
Why do I hear "Oh, Daddy" by Fleetwood Mac when I think of "The October Game?" Talk about a maladjusted, dysfunctional family! I have to hand it to Ray... (ew, bad visual) he certainly can write about the calmly psychotic with the most beautiful flair. He writes using all the senses. Simply writing what one sees is no substitute for the total experience. Some readers would say that a Bradbury story is so well-tuned to all five senses that there is no room for imagination. Well, so what. If, once in a while, a storyteller manages to sweep his readers into a nightmarish world where even their imaginations are no longer under their control, so be it.
Bradbury's "white bone masks and cut pumpkins and [the] smell of dropped candle fat" on page 238 mix with the apples in new skins of caramel...vast bowls of punch fresh mixed...[and] scooped, vented pumpkins peering triangularly from each cold window" on the same page. This coldly beautiful Halloween setting makes the endgame even more disturbing. As for the endgame itself... I think, perhaps, that I have read too many horror novels, seen too many Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes, or heard too many campfire stories when I was growing up. I had figured out, by page 242, that the child would be the sacrifice to Mich's sanity. Bradbury tells us this on page 241: "Yes, That was it. That would hurt [Louise, his wife] most of all. To take Marion away." I didn't know, however, that a father, even one so disturbed by the ice in his marriage and the coldness of the weather, could take his own child's life so serenely. But, as Bradbury wrote of Mich, "There was an acid walled off in him that slowly had eaten through tissue and bone over the years, and now, tonight, it would reach the wild explosive in him and all would be over! (241)"