From Dark Carnival to The Small Assassin...

You'd be forgiven for getting confused over the apparently endless re-shuffling of stories between Ray Bradbury's early collections. I know I am.

To clear my own mind, I created this table which shows the six basic editions of Dark Carnival, The October Country and The Small Assassin.

To get some insight into why this re-shuffling came about, read my "Lockdown posts" on those three books. But, in brief, it was a combination of editor preference for each edition, combined with Bradbury opportunistically tweaking his table of contents each time a new edition was in preparation.

Bradbury once wrote something to the effect that he didn't believe in re-writing his younger self, and that he let his books stand as originally written. Please don't believe him. It's just not true. Ray was an inveterate re-writer and table-of-contents-tweaker!

The table below puts the various stories in alphabetical order. And it probably has some errors, although I've double-checked it eight times over... Click on the table to make it bigger.

The Dark Carnival/October Country/Small Assassin re-shuffle. Click to embiggen.