This latest Countdown here at Macabre Republic focuses squarely on Ray Bradbury's carnivalesque and autumnal short fiction (i.e. not every story gathered in the collections Dark Carnival and The October Country will be eligible, and some selections will come from other Bradbury volumes). Kicking off the Countdown today is...
#10."The Dead Man" (collected in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales)
Without a doubt, this is Bradbury's most subtle piece of Halloween fiction. It unfolds as an offbeat bit of American Gothic, concerning a vagabond who walks around--when he's not stretching himself out supine in the gutter--claiming that he died by drowning during the flood that destroyed his farm. The townspeople treat "Odd Martin" as a local kook more than a metaphysical marvel (one resident, though, suggests that the reason everyone jokes about Odd is because deep down they are scared to take him seriously). It's not until about two-thirds of the way through the story that the time of year becomes clear, when a group of teens try to recruit Odd as an animated prop for their Halloween party. The scene is brief yet pivotal, because the teens' callous, condescending attitudes leave Odd in a "strange and bitter" mood; soon thereafter he decides to get himself cleaned up and to propose marriage to Miss Weldon, the lonely manicurist who has always been kind to him. This decision in turn facilitates the story's twist ending:the revelation of where the newlyweds have made their home (hint: Odd didn't deal with the town's sole real estate broker when purchasing the place).
With its seamless blend of the sentimental and the macabre, "The Dead Man" is vintage Bradbury. And if Halloween represents a time when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead blurs, then the October-ending holiday is perfectly suited to themes of this pleasantly haunting tale.
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