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Something Wicked This Way Comes
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July 2018: Something Wicked This Way Comes
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I just finished SWTWC, and I really enjoyed it-- it moved along very well and kept me glued to the book, but in the end, although I liked it very very much, I did not love it. A lot of the prose was sheer magic, especially when Bradbury was describing being young in the autumn in a small town-- that was when I felt as if I was really in the story. This was my first time reading the book, and I never felt that it really crossed over the line into being a horror story-- to me, it read more like a dark fairy tale, with Mr Dark in the rôle of the wicked witch who wore his familiars on his skin. I am not sure why this book is counted in the Green Town series; it is very different from the other books. I am currently reading The October Country (4 stories in) and so far I'm really enjoying it-- the tone is very different from SWTWC, and every year around Hallowe'en I like to revisit The Halloween Tree, which is one of my favorite autumn reads. Even if I don't read the entire story every year, I always read the description of the Great Tree. The first 5 or 6 chapters of that book carry me right back to being young at Hallowe'en.
Classics for Beginners
Books mentioned in this topic
The Halloween Tree (other topics)Something Wicked This Way Comes (other topics)
The October Country (other topics)
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Blurb from Gollancz edition)
It's the week before Hallowe'en, and Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois. The siren song of the calliope entices all with promises of youth regained and dreams fulfilled... as two boys trembling on the brink of manhood set out to explore the mysteries of the dark carnival's smoke, mazes and mirrors, they will also discover the true price of innermost wishes...
Ray Bradbury (from Wikipedia)
Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. He worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery fiction.
Widely known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and his science-fiction and horror-story collections, The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and I Sing the Body Electric (1969), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers. While most of his best known work is in speculative fiction, he also wrote in other genres, such as the coming-of-age novel Dandelion Wine (1957) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992).
On his death in 2012, The New York Times called Bradbury "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream"