1 Oct // I have been lost down every road I follow
1 Oct 2023
weather: glorious
mood: donning the sacrificial robes
music: Queens of the Stone Age, "Burn the Witch"
It’s like the leaves are trying to taunt him.
By mid-September, they have all developed a jaundice, the crouch before the leap. We are ready, they say with each rustling breeze. We are ready, are you?
For the first time in some years, his answer is an unequivocal yes. No rushing this time, except for the ways in which one is always rushing at the end of something — rushing to conclude, or rushing to prepare for what happens next, or just rushing because that is what we humans do and it is easier to embrace the default mode than it is to fight against those powerful currents of society. And he does rush to many things, harried by those taunting leaves. There are birthdays and weddings, work events and interesting happenings, each of them stacked ever-so-slightly too close together on the calendar.
“Soon enough, when the leaves change, I’ll have a minute to breathe,” he repeats, often enough to become a mantra.
As he crosses states in the car, he murmurs: “Soon enough, when the leaves change, I’ll have a minute to breathe.”
Buried under an aural avalanche of conversation, slowly digging his way out, he hears like an overtone hidden in the voices: “Soon enough, when the leaves change, I’ll have a minute to breathe.”
What happens, as always, is that the leaves begin their change without his noticing. That jaundice does not snap forward in a single thunderclap of color — too wet, too strange a year (aren’t they all, nowadays, he hears said in stores and bars and fields) — but instead with a shake, the trees begin to go to rust. He checks his calendar, sees that he still has time. His bag is packed, he’ll be ready, there’s no need to rush. Much to do between then and now.
And so it happens that he finds himself away on the night when he is meant to pick up that bag, to make his fateful and annual way. He didn’t think about it, he was in fact rushing. He wouldn’t trade any of it, any of the things he’s been flinging himself across space-time to be a part of, but that potential for a minute to breathe seems as remote as it did weeks ago, when the leaves warned him to prepare. He did prepare, he listened! And yet!
As he lays down, fitful and tired on a mattress not his own in a place he does not call home, his already-sleeping wife murmurs something that he can’t quite make out. He’s tempted to ask her to repeat herself, but he doesn’t want to wake her, doesn’t want to take any second of rest from her when he knows just how precious those moments are. But she reaches for his hand as he begins to close his eyes and it’s like she passes him something, a handoff on the edge of wakefulness.
On the platform, he looks down and sees a ticket envelope in one hand, his bag in another. On the envelope is a note: “I got the tickets. See you tomorrow.”
She is coming a day late, in order to tie up a loose end of her own. He knew that, and yet he’d forgotten. Rushing, rushing, rushing…
At the bottom of the ticket envelope, another note: “Someone Russian is bound to slip on a banana peel! Xo”
He will do better, next time. Next year. Tomorrow. He did alright, this time. The leaves are there to tell him so, as he takes his seat on the train and waits for the conductor, his old annual friend. He hears the man call out to the platform, announcing the train’s destination, and as the train begins to pull away, he opens up his bag and ponders where to begin...
The 2023 October Country Reading List
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Picador)
Disturbance by Jenna Clarke (W.W. Norton)
Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire (W.W. Norton)
A God in the Shed by J.F. Dubeau (Inkshares)
McSweeney's Vol. 71: The Monstrous and the Terrible, edited by Brian Evenson (McSweeney's Quarterly Tendency)
Gothic by Philip Fracassi (Cemetery Dance)
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman (William Morrow)
Calamities by Renee Gladman (Wave Books)
A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand (Mulholland Books)
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow (Tor Books, re-read)
Sucker by Daniel Hornsby (Anchor Books)
Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley (John Murray)
The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies by John Langan (Hippocampus Press)
The Shining by Dorothea Lasky (Wave Books)
The Book of Love by Kelly Link (Random House, out Feb 2024)
Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon (Scribner, out Mar 2024)
Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri (Tilted Axis)
The Wonder State by Sara Flannery Murphy (MCD/FSG)
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by GennaRose Nethercott (Vintage, out Feb 2024)
White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead, re-read)
Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante (Metonymy Press)
Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett (Gollancz)
Bellwether Rhapsody by Kate Racculia (Mariner Books)
Gallant by V.E. Schwab (Greenwillow)
Knock Knock Open Wide by Neil Sharpson (Tor Nightfire)
Spa by Erik Svetoft, translated by Melissa Bowers (Fantagraphics)
Midnight on Beacon Street by Emily Ruth Verona (Harper Perennial)
Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig (Del Rey, Stardust House Library edition)
A bonus, this year: a handful of suitable books that I nevertheless treated myself to in August/September, as preludes.
The September House by Carissa Orlando (Berkley), Edenville by Sam Rebelein (William Morrow -- also, you can catch me chatting w/ Sam about the book at The Golden Notebook at 2pm on Oct 15th, either in-person or on IG at @goldennotebookbookstore), The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers (Redhook, out Jan 2024), Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt (Nightfire).
For those of you new to this -- well, first of all, welcome, hello, thanks for reading. What a pleasure to see you all in this passenger car as well, as the train bears us on into the October Country. This list happens once a year, more books than I could possibly read in 31 calendar days -- but it is nice to have choices, isn't it?
The October Country is, yes, a state of mind / a place for spooks and scares and all that -- but it is also more, and more interesting. It is, to my mind, the 'place' on the calendar that is the most liminal. Nothing feels more temporary than autumn, and inside of autumn nothing is more temporary than October, when the mood can shift (sometimes irrevocably!) in the space of a mere day. You don't really get that in winter, spring, or summer -- there is more of a stretching out, or settling in. Nothing's ever quite the same as it was a moment before, in the October Country, and that is worth celebrating.
Also, I just love reading spooky/spooky-adjacent books, and I take it many of you do as well. I hope your TBR stacks have something a little chilling on them for the weeks to come, and I'd certainly love to know about it if so.
Two quick bits of business, which I normally would leave out / save for another letter, but seeing as these come out maybe quarterly...
I've sold a story! My first real-deal story, published and printed and everything. (Not only that, but it has already been misinterpreted back to me -- I am now, truly, a writer.) It's called "Two Lines" and it is available in the first issue of Litt Magazine. You can order it online / find it in all good Catskill bookstores, and I believe the story will be up on their website at some point. If it isn't, I'll get it up on mine by the end of the year. Perhaps at some point I'll put together some notes about it -- something I'd like to do for all my fiction, eventually; I love a story-notes section at the back of a collection.
The third season of Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre is quickly coming to a close -- I'm so proud of this show, and it is a real labor of love. This season featured Chuck Tingle/J.R. Dawson/Durreen Shahnaz, Emily Tesh/Vajra Chandrasekera/Sophie Strand, S.L. Coney/Ruthanna Emrys/Alexis Pauline Gumbs, S.L. Huang/Julia Vee/Ken Bebelle -- and upcoming we've got V.E. Schwab/Lina Rather/Oliver Darkshire, Kristen Simmons/two guests I'm keeping secret til the recordings happen. It would mean the WORLD to me if you subscribed, and even more if you'd leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Listenership is weird post-Twitter, and I hate asking for these things but it turns out they do matter!
I raise a glass of mulled wine, or cider, or Southern Tier Pumking (the only good pumpkin beer -- although I confess that I do fuck with a Shipyard Pumpkinhead now and again) to you! May your spooky season be exactly as eerie as you'd prefer. See you soon.
xo
D