The October Country is many places: a picturesque Mexican village, where death is a tourist attraction; a city beneath the city, where drowned lovers are silently reunited; a carnival midway, where a tiny man’s most cherished fantasy can be fulfilled night after night.

The October Country’s inhabitants live, dream, work, die—and sometimes live again—discovering, often too late, the high price of citizenship. Here a glass jar can hold memories or nightmares; a woman’s newborn child can plot her murder; and a man’s own skeleton can war against him.

Here there is no escaping the dark stranger who lives upstairs . . . or the reaper who wields the world.