Djinn & Bitters

THE OCTOBER COUNTRY (306 pp.)--Ray Bradbury--Ballantine Books ($3.50; paperback, $.35).

Among readers who fancy vampires, succubi, werewolves and other monsters, a young (35) Californian named Ray Bradbury is regarded as the arrived monster-monger, fit replacement for August Derleth, eldritch statesman of the well-informed witchlover. Author Bradbury may owe even more to John Collier, another veteran djinn-and-bitters addict. Like Mary Wollstonecraft (Frankenstein) Shelley and Bram (Dracula) Stoker, these writers appeal to the middle or relatively uncorrugated brow, rather than the highbrow, who finds more than enough to bite his nails over in the Age of Anxiety without faking up a little more. The highbrow, in fact, whose modern poetic world has been defined by Poet Marianne Moore as "imaginary gardens with real toads," does not scare easily at imaginary toads, even if, as in Author Bradbury's case, the gardens are real enough.

This book shows skill and ingenuity in the business of saying "boo" to grownups, but sometimes the "boo" does not ring true. While horror may indeed lie below the asphalt of a city's streets, one does not enter that world--as does Bradbury's character in The Cistern--by way of an actual clanging manhole cover. Life may end as a pickled monstrosity in a jar of alcohol; with Bradbury, in The Jar, that end is only a beginning. There are 19 stories in this book, but the best of the lot is more rib-tickling than spine-tingling. The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse tells of a fellow called George Garvey, so indescribably dull and ordinary that he becomes the pet of an avant-garde group, as a symbol, apparently, of what is wrong with bourgeois U.S. They take to hanging out in his respectable apartment and quoting his unquotable bromides in their modish cold-water flats. Garvey beats the avant-gardists at their own game. He loses a little finger slamming a car door and replaces the member with a mandarin's jeweled nail guard.

He wishes he could do more, and one eye obediently goes blind. No Hathaway-shirt eye patches for him. He commissions Henri Matisse to paint him a blue-eyed poker chip as a monocle. Harper's Bazaar publishes Garvey's picture with his Matisse eye, and soon half the intelligentsia are playing poker with trompe-l'oeil chips. The neat little spoof suggests that Bradbury would do very well if he came out from under that fright wig.

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