SOURCE: "Short Stories," in Ray Bradbury, Starmont House, 1989, pp. 83-91.

In the following excerpt, Touponce discusses how psychoanalytic themes, such as "psychosis, hysteria, delirium, neurosis, hypochondria, the death wish, [and the unconscious," unify the otherwise unrelated stories collected in Bradbury's The October Country.]

Bradbury's first collection of stories was Dark Carnival (1947), but . . . since the book has long been out of print (indeed it is something of a collector's item), I will not be discussing it here. We will be concerned instead with a collection of nineteen stories in the horror/weird/fantasy vein published under the title The October Country (1955). Fifteen of these stories are from Dark Carnival (which originally contained twenty-seven stories), selected, edited, and in some cases rewritten by Bradbury.

The remark made by Mr. Harris, the protagonist of the story "Skeleton" who is deliriously obsessed with protecting his internal organs from an attack by his...