Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town, #2)

by Ray Bradbury

And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bed-sheets around corners. But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early. One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight.

Bradbury setting the scene and the vibe so immaculately

Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.

Nostalgic for childhood

THE ILLUSTRATED MAN! Hey!” “That’s just an old guy with tattoos.” “No.” Jim breathed warm on the paper. “He’s illustrated. Special. See! Covered with monsters! A menagerie!”

Bradbury referencing his own work

“Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty. And men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites. Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn’t just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that’s your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I’ve known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. I suppose it’s thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can’t let himself alone, won’t lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.

Bradbury's philosophy of morals

Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody

Wisdom

The Redman house! Not lived in in years! Two blocks more!

Just like the one in Watsonville!!!

Tall as a dead tree in winter, all skull, all scarecrow-stilted bones, the thin man, the Skeleton, Mr. Skull played his xylophone shadow upon hidden things, cold paper rubbish, warm flinching boys, below.

I love Bradbury's use of imagery here

“J.C. G.M.,” said Jim. “Those are the same initials as on the throwaways around town this week. But—it couldn’t be the same men. . . .” “No?” Will’s father rubbed his elbows. “My goose pimples run counter to that.” He laid forth other old newspapers. “1860. 1846. Same ad. Same names. Same initials. Dark and Cooger, Cooger and Dark, they came and went, but only once every twenty, thirty, forty years, so people forgot. Where were they all the other years? Traveling. And more than traveling. Always in October: October 1846, October 1860, October 1888, October 1910, and October now, tonight.” His voice trailed off. “. . . Beware the autumn people. . . .”

I wonder if this is the influence for King's haunted locale of Derry, Maine and its recurring monster, Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

‘For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ’s birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles—breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.’

Bradbury really has an affinity for the seasons, particularly autumn.