A visit to the october country — 2024

He is waiting.

Sitting in the station, on one of those long wooden benches, he is waiting—but his mind isn’t on the task at hand. In a sense, he isn’t really waiting so much as he is thinking about or doing a hundred other things to fill every possible second while he ‘waits’ and gods it is all so exhausting, isn’t it? To fill every tick of the clock with a thought or an action, to be too-present in your own mind.

He wants to be impressive, he wants to be assured of his usefulness, and mostly he just wants to leave it all behind. Ticket in his pocket, he’d rather leap onto the back of the train and pretend that none of it was planned, that he is escaping and that to escape would feel good.

This isn’t to say that he doesn’t want his life and the things happening in it. It’s an exciting time, hope continues to linger in the air in more than the turning of the leaves, and yet…

He looks up at the old split-flap departures board, waiting for the rolling rattle of information. But the sign does not move.

Some years it is harder, he thinks, to pierce the veil. Imagination is all well and good, embracing your personal joy and all that—but what about work? Family and work and bills and weddings and concerts and parties and friends and the garden and love and dinner and the endless return of laundry and all those words he’s meant to be writing and the things he wants to do and the places he is meant to see and the wants that he has!

He closes his eyes and takes a breath.

Rustle-rattle, rustle-rattle.

The board is turning over, a letter at a time, wiping clean and renewing itself and he sees the track number appear, sees BOARDING roll to a stop, and he gathers his things. Some years are the rush and roil, others are the rest and relaxation. Maybe this one is the former now, maybe it will end that way too, but who can say? Time only rolls forward, like the train soon will, bearing him on into the October Country. He finds his seat and pulls a book from his bag…

The 2024 October Country Reading List

  • Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram

  • The Thief of Always by Clive Barker

  • The Forgery by Ave Barrera, tr. by Ellen Jones & Robin Myers

  • Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron

  • TRVE CVLT by Michael Bettendorf

  • The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

  • Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

  • Revelator by Daryl Gregory

  • The Black Lord by Colin Hinckley

  • Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley

  • The Eyes are the Best Part by Monika Kim

  • Hampton Heights by Dan Kois

  • House of Windows by John Langan

  • Schrader’s Chord by Scott Leeds

  • The Cthulhu Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (various) by James Lovegrove

  • Woodworm by Layla Martínez, tr. by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott

  • The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohammed

  • Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

  • Suburban Death Project by Aimee Parkison

  • Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker

  • Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, tr. by Douglas J. Weatherford

  • Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab

  • A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims

  • Model Home by Rivers Solomon

  • My Death by Lisa Tuttle

  • The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

  • The Echoes by Evie Wyld

  • The Psychographist by Carson Winter