![]() (Not all snails: Some reproduce sexually, some asexually. He really was using the scientific sense of the word, in the way we still describe snails today. Of course, we can’t blame Ray Bradbury for using the word asexual like this, because he wrote “The October Game” more than half a century before ‘asexuality’ widely described human sexual orientation. It is clearly the husband who is struggling with lack of attraction, love, empathy etc., as if all of those completely separate aspects of humanity can be bundled into one. The husband in “The October Game” actually accuses his wife of being asexual because he feels nothing for his own daughter, but readers will likely interpret that he doth protest too much. In stories like these, to psychopathic, unfeeling fictional characters who do terrible, terrible things to other people are somehow associated with asexuality, as if someone’s orientation affects more than attraction. I am careful to mention this because ‘asexual’ continues to be used as an insult and asexual people are still, far too frequently, compared to lower order species. ![]() Asexual now does describe humans - without metaphor - and refers to a sexual orientation which doesn’t point anywhere in particular. Asexual now describes a sexual orientation, in the same word family as homosexual, heterosexual, bi-plus, pansexual and so on. This is not how the word should ever be used today, even in fiction, because around the turn of the 21st century, another usage of the word asexual started to be used more widely, eventually cementing into the lexicon. In the 1940s, the word asexual was not used to describe humans, except in metaphor describing people as snails and amebae. This man feels so little for his daughter that he describes his wife as ‘asexual’. Ray Bradbury describes how the guy is cold without attempting to hint at the whys and wherefores. What alchemy had there been in Louise that took the dark of a dark man and bleached and bleached the dark brown eyes and black hair and washed and bleached the ingrown baby all during the period before birth until the child was born, Marion, Blonde, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked? Sometimes he suspected that Louise had conceived the child as an idea, completely asexual, an immaculate conception of contemptuous mind and cell. ![]() Marion and Louise, the two silent denouncers of his virility, his dark power. From the skull sockets small blue eyes smiled. ASEXUAL (MIS)REPRESENTATION IN FICTIONįrom under the mask, blonde hair showed. It really is enough for readers to know that he’s completely cold. We get no backstory and, in a narrative like this, it would be a mistake to give him one. He arrives on the page in statu nascendi - as if he’s just been born. Whether this was brought on by wartime experience or because he’s a narcissist doesn’t matter to the story. ![]() He has no emotional connection to his wife and child. On the page, the guy has some kind of personality disorder. Since this is the post-war period, we might deduce this guy has returned from war with complex post traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD) but that’s reading beyond the text. He despises how his ice queen/witch wife really gets into the spirit of the season, decorating the house and yard, organising a fun party for the neighbourhood children. CHARACTERISATIONĪ father with an eight-year-old daughter called Marion and a wife called Louise lives in the suburbs and hates Hallowe’en. Spring has the inverse effect on him, because everything is is springing to life. Autumn affects this man by infusing him with the melancholy of an ending. The family live in a suburban Dream House, which are always two-storeys high and usually have a basement and attic.īradbury also utilises the symbolism of seasons. The suburbs are frequently a horror arena in storytelling, because they are so often a ‘ snail under the leaf‘ setting: Everything looks great, but move a leaf and find a horrible, slimy snail. When Marion can’t be found, readers deduce that the neighbourhood guests are dipping their hands into the entrails of monster-father’s dead eight-year-old daughter. Louise notices her own daughter is very quiet, so reassures her. Everybody slides down a slide into the darkness where he passes around innards. ![]() Monster-father sets up a ‘fun’ game in the cellar. Other mothers tell Louise how lucky she is to have such an involved husband, so good with the kids. The monster-father takes over organising the party games. His own eight-year-old daughter is the first to realise what her father is planning. WHAT HAPPENS IN “THE OCTOBER GAME”Ī monster of a father spikes the punch at a Hallowe’en party organised by his wife, then uses real human entrails for the basement party game. It has the plot of an urban legend with characterisation typical of a written narrative. “The October Game” (1948) is a short Hallowe’en horror story by American author Ray Bradbury. ![]()
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