The October Game

[cyberghostface.insanejournal.com]

This is from Shock SuspenStories #9. 

This is the big "finale" to my EC posts. Nothing's set in stone, of course, but at the time being this is it. So just in time for Halloween, it's EC's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "The October Game". Enjoy...

Comments

[brandiweed.livejournal.com (from insanejournal.com)]

Is this Jack Kamen's art?

[cyberghostface.insanejournal.com]

Yeah.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

And it's perfect for this.

Kamen's art is deceptive in its seeming sweetness. It positioned him perfectly to go over the line into perversity, the hapless reader having no warning. People forget too that he was one of the foremost of the EC crime artists. I look at him as being a seed of a style we'd later associate with David Lynch. (and there's more than a touch of Lang and Sirk in his work.)

[xdoop.insanejournal.com]

How much time occurred between him picking her up, and the game?

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

That's the one thing in this that I've never bought. It appears less than a minute or two. It seems to be a fault of the comic's pacing, not the story's.

[xdoop.insanejournal.com]

Here's how it's written in the original story.

The upper house was empty and silent in the candle-shine. Marion stood by the slide. 'Here we go,' he said, and picked her up.

They sat in a vast circle in the cellar. Warmth came from the distant bulk of the furnace.

[stig.insanejournal.com]

Odd how two little dots can completely change the length of time between two sentences, eh?

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

"The two silent denouncers of his virility, his dark power..."

Damn, Ray.

Damn.



*shivers*

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Keep in mind, Bradbury often adopted a subjective-third-person voice, tainted with the viewpoint of the protagonist.

Then again, the other Bradbury story in SHOCK was "Small Assassin," in which an evil baby murders his mom. There's a lot of post-war gynophobia, and fear of domesticity, in his work, certainly. But then, those were the anxieties of those who'd buy what his work was in, after all.

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

Oh, I wasn't assuming that Bradbury was/is psycho, just complementing him on a really good line.

[stig.insanejournal.com]

I think Bradbury's success, like Moore's or Gaiman's, is his ability to excel in a variety of genres seemingly effortlessly. He can completely turn on the creepy and horrid like this, or be incisive and heartwarming enough to be adapted into a children's play like this (http://fremontcentretheatre.com). It probably comes of his habit of never going a day without writing. Were it not a wee bit pretentious, I'd call him the American Shakespeare or H.G. Wells.

What's your favourite Ray story? Off the top of my head, I'd mention my all-time favourite, A Sound Of Thunder, along with The Veldt, Doodad, And The Moon Be Still As Bright, Way Up In The Air & its sequel, The Other Foot, The Inspired Chicken Motel, The Day It Rained Forever, Any Friend Of Nicholas Nickleby's Is A Friend Of Mine, The Town Where No-One Got Off, Here There Be Tygers, and my other all-time favourite, Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed.

[sistermagpie.insanejournal.com]

I think my favorite might be The Jar. And I love the opening paragraph of The April Witch. But this one's always been a favorite of mine too. I feel like I'm probably forgetting a lot of them.

[halloweenjack.insanejournal.com]

“A Sound of Thunder”, definitely.

[stig.insanejournal.com]

Oh, and I almost forgot, there's an edition of "The Homecoming" illustrated by Dave McKean that is FANTASTIC. You should check it out.

[neuhallidae.insanejournal.com]

Short-story-wise, Zero Hour, because it was the only story of his that gave me honest to God nightmares as a kid.

[jlroberson]

"There Will Come Soft Rains." Beautiful, funny and sinister all at the same time. And not a single character in it.
http://www.jerrywbrown.com/datafile/datafile/110/ThereWillComeSoftRains_Bradbury.pdf

[sistermagpie.insanejournal.com]

I think I remember first hearing this story before I knew it was Ray Bradbury, and just being that much more impressed with the guy when I realized he wrote this story too? Just...wow.

[currer.insanejournal.com]

I'm a bit lost. What happened at the end? Why was turning on the lights a bad idea?

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Dismembered daughter.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Creepy story no doubt. Though I'm confused why the guy says he must legally hurt his wife and then freakin' murders his daughter...

[20thcenturyvole.insanejournal.com]

I don't think the guy said he wanted to do it legally - I mean, he was contemplating a gun in the first panel.

[dustbunny105.insanejournal.com]

On page four he explicitly thinks to himself that he needs to figure a way to take Marion away from Louise legally.

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

The real genius in this is that it only IMPLIES; it does not TELL. We can guess what the ending is - the last panel makes it pretty clear what the ending is - but it doesn't actually tell us. It leaves the ending to ones imagination. We know what it SHOULD be, but it COULD be something else. Maybe Marion ISN'T dead and dismembered. Maybe she's just hiding behind the furnace or something. Maybe, maybe, maybe - it's all in the maybe. Without that ambiguity, the story wouldn't be nearly as effective, because if Marion ISN'T all cut up into pieces, then what they're all looking at is EVEN WORSE - and your imagination can fill in just what that might be.