Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
by Ray Bradbury

Avon
Publication Date: 1962

From Goodreads:

A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show’s smoke, mazes, and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes – and the stuff of nightmare.

This one was a surprise!

It’s not that I didn’t expect to like Ray Bradbury. Even though the last thing of his I read was Fahrenheit 451 (and that was back in high school!) I knew he was a legend.

The surprise came when I started the book and found it hard to relate. The dialogue seemed dated, instead of timeless. I didn’t need them to sound modern, but it felt so removed that it was nearly cheesy.

Then, the second surprise: the disconnected quickly faded away as I lost myself in a really incredible story.

Everything was so simple, but so expertly done that I really did find myself on edge. The villain wasn’t the big bad I’m used to seeing. He was much more muted, and that was wonderful. He was fierce and mysterious. Though he would display a portion of his abilities from time to time, a lot was left up to my imagination. This made his even more frightening. I didn’t know what his limitations were, if he had any at all. For all I knew, he could have been all-powerful. Immortal.

But my absolute favourite part of this book was Charles Holloway. The main characters from the first page are two 12 year-olds, Jim and Will. Charles is Will’s father. And though he didn’t really come into the story until the last third or so, he was a beast.

Whenever he began to speak, everything he said was deep and poetic. The rest of the book could have just been monologues by this guy and I would have been just fine with that. But then he turns into a bad ass. Again, not in the sense that we’re used to in today’s age. He didn’t suit up with every imaginable weapon and hunt down the enemy one by one. But he still faced the enemy, head on, by himself. And the only weapon he had was his mind.

If you’ve never read this classic, get it on your TBR RIGHT NOW! I’m going to be putting a lot more Bradbury on my TBR!

Fun fact about this post: I’m watching THIS IS US and it’s making this post take a million years to write.