A visit to the october country — 2025

What a joy!

The fall, so short and so confused these past years, has returned to something of its former glories — sleeping with the windows open the whole of September, more days of long pants than shorts, the foliage turning slow but inexorable. This is how it used to be.

How odd, he thinks, this other mourning — not for the change or the unknown future, but for the last gasps of what had been. Too simple to say he’d thought these days were gone for good, because he does know that isn’t how it works. There will be good years, even in the wreck. Best to enjoy them, he tells himself.

And so it is that he’s found his way early. It’s different from what is to come but the sense of it is there. Flickering visits, like spliced frames from a later reel of the same film. Different, too, from his out-of-season reading — those moments never feel like visits, no matter their quality. There is a point to this time, this ritual, this voyage. It cannot be replicated. But it can, he’s delighted to discover, expand.

These years have of late been about contraction and he’s tired of it. Tired of the scramble, tired of the scuffle, tired of the scrum. “Do less in order to do more,” someone told him and it rings in his head every time he thinks about saying yes to one more thing. Paradoxical that he might say he tires of contraction, and yet he’s about to contract — but that’s wrong, he knows. Culling is not contraction, it is just preparation for further expansion. A readying.

And why not do so, when there’s such joy to be found! Joy in the turning leaves, in the slow-chilling air, in the faster-falling dark! He can almost feel himself ready to write again, ready to live again, ready to just be again.

He’s thinking about all of this as he falls asleep and it puts a pep into his step as he walks down the platform towards the conductor, who is smiling, greeting him by name, punching his ticket. The car is warm, a pot of tea well-steeped and waiting. The dog is curled on the seat across from him, head pushing into his wife’s leg. The train starts off with a jolt and then they pick up speed, green and gold giving way to orange red brown. He reaches into his bag and pulls out a book…

The 2025 October Country Reading List

  • Moths by Rosalind Ashe

  • The Unveiling by Quan Barry

  • The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, tr. by Sarah Moses

  • The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, tr. by Ruth L.C. Simms

  • Black Magic by Marjorie Bowen

  • Herculine by Grace Byron

  • Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

  • Feast of the Pale Leviathan by John Chrostek

  • It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken

  • Somebody is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez, tr. by Megan McDowell

  • The Retreat by Gemma Fairclough

  • The Lost Stradivarius by J. Meade Falkner

  • The Owl Service by Alan Garner

  • The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez

  • Stainless by Todd Grimson

  • 8114 by Joshua Hull

  • The Undying Monster by Jessie Douglas Kerruish

  • Canon by Paige Lewis (May 2026)

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

  • Good Boy by Neil McRobert

  • Vampires at Sea by Lindsay Merbaum

  • The Veldt Institute by Samuel M. Moss

  • The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch

  • The Oceans of Cruelty by Douglas J. Penick

  • Benighted by J.B. Priestly

  • The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, tr. by Martin Aiken

  • The Salvage by Anbara Salam

  • The Fountain by Casey Scieszka (March 2026)

  • Anybody Home? by Michael J. Seidlinger

  • The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling

  • The Shocking Experiments of Miss Mary Bennet by Melinda Taub

  • Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  • Ghosts by Edith Wharton

  • The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre by Cho Yeeun, tr. by Yewon Jung