The story is a pure dark poetry.It’s October… A month of Halloween… A month of ghostly beings… A month of mysterious expectations…The seller of lightning-rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.There are two thirteen-year-old boys… Two friends…...

“Beware the autumn people.”A travelling carnival arrives in a small midwestern town one day in October, resulting in a nightmarish experience for two 13 year old boys.Do you like coming of age tales? Do you like beautifully written prose? Do you like your stories to invoke stunning autumnal imagery whilst whisking you away to the carnival? Well then, step right up, because Something Wicked This Way Comes...Ray Bradbury has been a new favourite for me this year. I read The Halloween Tree last yea...

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury is a 1998 Avon publication- originally published in 1962.I can’t believe it is already October, but at the same time, I’m glad it’s here. October is one of my favorite months of the year! One reason for that is that I get to pull out a spooky or scary book and create fun blog posts for Halloween. The downside is that there are so many books to choose from, and so little time to get them read. Usually, I only manage to get one horror novel read, out...

The carnival has come to town.



I have to admit I love the movie more than the book because, well, I enjoy watching the creepiness! I think I need to dig the movie out now and watch it 😊

Jim and Will are two young boys that are drawn into the carnival and they try to help stop the evil.



Creepy good fun!!

Mel ❤️

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. MacBeth Act 4, Scene 1This book is straight-forward good vs. evil – and is quite terrifying at points! It goes beyond fantasy and mysticism and straight to the terrifying possibilities from the darkest reaches. This would be a great story to read if you are looking for a campfire tale, a Halloween scare, or a late night, nightmare causing fright fest. Some may find the scariness lost within the poetry of Bradbury’s writing, but fo...

The Ray Bradbury I remember reading decades ago was not this poetic. Something Wicked was a surprise, his evocative language doing so much to capture the mood of early fall and the seasons of life, both literally and metaphorically. Clearly, he loves words in their many forms. Equally clearly, he is gifted as using those words to create a finely layered tale about two thirteen-year-old boys when the carnival comes to town. These boys are on the brink of change; longing to be older, to do more an...

I had an incredibly hard time reading this book, especially considering it's a 300-page linear story about an evil circus coming to a small town. I think it's because — unlike Fahrenheit 451 — Bradbury overwrote this book to the point of it being dense poetry rather than prose. The dialogue is sparse and stilted, and the descriptions are never-ending, and hard to follow.Reading the opening chapter, the language excited me. I falsely assumed it was just being used to set the mood and would taper ...

Mark Twain famously died in 1910 and Ray Bradbury was born ten years later in 1920. And on that day, the shadow of Samuel Clemens touched a mark on the baby’s head, and nearby the shade of Charles Dickens looked on in approval.Bradbury is the bridge to our past, our bright and strong and colorful past. Twain’s world was as bold as a young America, full of steamboats, and fishing holes and jumping frogs. Bradbury, no less an American, but a resident of the October Country, revealed the long shado...

I read this when I was an insanely romantic teenager and since then the cruel world has beaten all that nonsense out of my brain with bars of iron and wires of barb, and left me bleeding and barfing in a vile ditch, so I should probably not have plucked my old Corgi paperback of Something Wicked out from my most cobwebbed shelf and thought to wander nostalgically recapturing the wonder and enrapturement I once perceived herein. In those faroff days I wanted to be the smile on the bullet, I wante...

Leveling any complaints against Bradbury seems like a literary crime, but I'm afraid I didn't enjoy Something Wicked as much I feel like I should have. The plot was really interesting, and right up my alley - evil carnival comes to town and preys on the unsuspecting citizens. The execution, however, left me wanting more.The first problem is that the prose is a bit outdated. It's like I ran into with The Haunting of Hill House, it just didn't age well over the last 40-50 years. It's not that it d...