I remember watching the Disney movie back in grade school. It fostered my horror of carnivals and men in top hats, music played backward, and the eerie irreality of people changing ages as they would change hats. As an adult reading the text, I was understandably awed by the rich metaphor and playful language.

Re-reading it now makes me melancholy.

Gone are the years that would support friendly neighbors in small towns where everyone knows everyone else, when the death of a barber actually makes a stir.

The fact is, this is an extremely bucolic coming of age tale centered on the choice to be good or bad with a lot of supernatural help.

Add a spattering of Stephen King's IT, a dab of Mary Poppins, stir firmly into a smooth wordplay of rife with the pastoral, and you've got Something Wicked This Way Comes. 1961.

I honestly don't know if it would stand the test of time for the newer generations. It is theoretically timeless by design, but despite my own personal memories, my objectivity wonders if it falls into a different category.

Mark Twain has appeal because it hits both the historical and the universal in just the right ways. Does Small Town Illinois during a carnival have the same staying power? Maybe. But let me be honest... my tastes have changed a lot since grade school. :)

This is not flashy even though it has great horror scenes. It's slow to develop although it goes at a whirlwind pace in places.

I'm still giving it 5 stars because it is objectively a beautiful piece of writing, but some of its power is slipping from my heart. Alas.

Una novela inquietante con una prosa confusa, poética, llena de espejismos, simbolismos, metáforas y engaños.
Para mi no es una historia que haya funcionado tan bien como 'El vino del estío', el texto a veces me resultaba agotador por sus repeticiones y saltos, pero al mismo tiempo no puedo dejar de admirar la manera de Bradbury de meternos en la vida y sentimientos de los dos niños protagonistas.
Me quedo por encima de todo con esa reflexión que sobrevuela durante toda la historia sobre la madurez (sobre elegir el camino correcto y esa eterna guerra del bien y el mal llena de matices..), pero también me maravilla la nostalgia que lo impregna todo y la atmósfera aterradora que va creando el autor (con cosas tan aparentemente poco aterradoras como un tiovivo).
Da la impresión, mientras lees este libro, de que ha supuesto un antes y un después en la literatura de terror. Y me parece una lectura perfecta para Halloween, para revivir esos terrores de infancia pero de verdad, sintiéndote niño de nuevo con todas las consecuencias.
Eso sí, no ha sido de los libros que más he disfrutado del autor, ni de los que más me han llegado.

Where I live it is still warm, and the leaves on the trees have yet to turn. Because of that, reading books like this is how I get into the Halloween spirit. There is a certain chill in the air here, yes, but it is not quite autumnal — yet. But while I was reading this classic novel about an evil carnival that has rolled into a small town a week before Halloween, and the two young boys who must fight the darkest fears they’ve ever faced, I felt the embrace of fall. And it was magical.

Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite writers, and perhaps my biggest inspiration. He was not just a wordsmith; he was a magician, dealing in whimsy and wonder and nostalgia and fear. In none of his works are his skills more evident than in this, one of his most notable releases. I don’t know of any author (aside from Stephen King, maybe) who writes about childhood with such accurate precision — and in such minimalistic language. In Bradbury’s writing is a certain economy of language that, I am sure, is much harder to pull off than it appears. Not a word is wasted here.

Perfect for the Halloween season (or any time of year, really), this is a landmark coming-of-age tale about friendship, fear, magic, and the strange alluring wonder that comes with small town carnivals. I am so glad I capped off my Halloween Bingo reading with this!

Read for ‘Classic Horror’ in Halloween Bingo.

In his 1981 non-fiction book Danse Macabre, Stephen King describes this book as one "that adults should take down once in a while...not just to give to their own children, but in order to touch base again themselves with childhood's brighter perspectives and darker dreams."

There is a timeless quality to this story, like the adventure books you read as a child, that even as an adult can enchant and ensnare you in its machinations and help you to escape, if only for a moment, the real world around you.

Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway are two 13-year old boys growing in a small Illinois town, presumably in the 1930s or 40s. One late October evening, a carnival comes to town. But this carnival is unlike any other with sinister intent and full of deleterious inhabitants. Along with Will's librarian father, Charles, the boys begin to uncover the unsavory parts of life, growing up, and facing fears.

The writing in this novel is purple prose, to say the very least. Where Bradbury could choose just one word, he chooses five or six. It's definitely a hindrance to the reading experience from time to time, but one that I think would translate well through audiobook or reading it aloud (this feels like a quintessential bedtime story to read to an older child who likes dark fairytales).

I absolutely loved the message of this book as told through the story of Charles Halloway. I love that even though this feels like it's aimed at children, Bradbury chose to include a central figure in his 50s who is a foil to the young boys. It gives a wider range of perspectives within the story and hammers home the themes of aging, wisdom, and laughing in the face of death.

If you'd asked me at the 50% mark how I felt about this book, I would've had a very different answer than I did at the end. The climax of this book was fantastic; it had me on the edge of my seat and turning the pages. It has that quality of resolution that older books do, with a nice storybook ending that you can't be mad at because it just feels *right*.

I can see why Stephen King might have been inspired by this for his own stories that center young protagonists who are learning the harsh realities of adulthood and the real world through a mystical or magical presence.

It's a story I imagine I will revisit in the future, and perhaps be able to overlook some of the issues in the prose for the impact the story has. If you were fortunate enough to read this as a child, I would highly recommend revisiting it as an adult. I think it's a story you can take more away from each time and will only grow more fond in my memory.

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 shadow of Twain’s history, echoing away like a train whistle far gone. As a citizen of Fall, Bradbury knows to beware the Autumn People and knows them and how to describe them.

In Bradbury’s October country tale Something Wicked This Way Comes, first published in 1962, Tom and Huck have become Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, one with a birthday a minute before midnight October 30th, the other born a minute after midnight, Halloween morning. Injun Joe is Mr. Dark, the illustrated man, the proprietor of the shadowy carnival that rolls into town every twenty or thirty years.

Bradbury’s rich poetic prose is what was described by Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society, alive and Whitman-like vibrant and descriptive with a swaggering electricity. The author draws us in with his illustration of Green Town; here a simile, like the sound of leaves racing down a late summer’s sidewalk, there a metaphor, a witch’s brew dark and murky, filled with spider webs and green frog smiles, and the color of a ghosts sigh.

In Mr. Dark, Bradbury has given us one of literature’s great villains, but drawn by the Grandmaster with empathy born of long familiarity.

One of the great stories from a great storyteller and a book that everyone should read.

*** 2020 reread - Bradbury's prose is timeless and never ceases to be magical, he's the master of metaphor.

This time around I focused on the friendship between Will and Jim and the relationship Will had with his father.

“Beware the Autumn People” – Stephen King must have been inspired by Mr. Dark and his carnival when he wrote about the pain vampires in Doctor Sleep.

The soliloquy by Mr. Holloway, explaining the genesis and motivations of Dark, followed immediately and ominously by the dialogue between Holloway and Dark, with the boys, Jim and Will, hiding was literary gold.

Bradbury’s rich prose must be savored and enjoyed like a heady brew.

Jim and Will are average 13 year old boys – best friends and next-door-neighbors who were born a day apart. They each have secret ladders they have managed to build outside of their bedroom windows in order to sneak out for some additional harmless mischief. Harmless, that is, until one September evening when the overwhelming scent of licorice and cotton candy fills the air and signals a carnival is coming to town. Little do the boys know they are about to embark on a journey to save their souls when they sneak out at midnight and discover Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show.

This took about one hot minute to read. I kept asking myself: “Why have I not read this before????” I have no idea how this one managed to slip through my fingers for so many years, but I’m extremely glad to have found it. A true horror classic that reads like pure poetry. Bradbury is a wizard with words.

Ray Bradbury's dark fantasy from 1962. I read this for a science fiction book discussion to be held in October. As I feared, while I enjoyed it, I feel it would have resonated much more if I had read it as a kid. Another thought is that it seemed so derivative of "It" and other Stephen King books. For that reason, I was going to give it ***--but I realize that wouldn't be fair. After all, it was Bradbury who influenced King, as King himself will attest ( also Neil Gaiman has stated that Bradbury was a big influence on him ). So, for that reason, and because it is so well-written, I have to give it ****. But it's not on the same level as Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451."

Update:
I finally got around to watching the movie.
While it was certainly better in film than audio book...
still not for me.

Original review:
Nope.
n  n
I can't even tell you what I didn't like since I zoned out so much.
I hear the movie is pretty awesome though so I'm gonna give that a go.

Somehow I ended up reading this around Christmas, when it's a solid Halloween book.

It's a lot more fun than I remembered! The language is delightfully overdone and overwrought. I read quite a bit of it out loud and thought the book was MUCH better that way.

(The book of course has its issues. I mean, at this point, just expect sudden and random thoughtless things if you read a classic like this.)

The small town that gets tested by an evil carnival is a great idea. There's something refreshing about something so clearly good vs evil, with some great temptations along the way.

Fun read. Read it out loud.

**Many thanks to @SimonBooks and Ray Bradbury for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!**

To Harry Potter fans and Shakespeare aficionados alike: I would wager these words in this title are MORE than a bit familiar. It's hard to even read it aloud without thinking of some of the most enduring works of our time, and to say this book is legendary in the genre is to do it an injustice. Often considered Bradbury's best and most enticing tale, Something Wicked This Way Comes COULD have been just another dark, macabre story...but managed to influence the pantheon in ways NOBODY saw coming!

The tale itself is fairly simple: two 13 year old boys, Jim and Will, are the best of friends and just plugging along in their day to day lives in their small Illinois town, Green Town. On one particularly eerie autumn night, however, the boys discover that an eerie carnival, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, is rolling into town...n  and it's like no carnival they've ever seen before. n With a haunted carousel, terrifying mirror maze, and a creepy 'ringmaster' Mr. Dark at its helm, Jim and Will MAY have landed in the middle of more than they bargained for...but can Will's father Charles Halloway save them with a bit of well-timed wisdom? Or will the forces of evil be too strong and unrelenting to let the boys make it until the circus once again rolls out of town?

I understand why this book was influential and popular and yet, at the same time, learning more about it in the second half and its origin story illuminated exactly WHY this book didn't quite work for me.

In short...it started as a screenplay.

Of course, in subsequent years film adaptations popped up regardless...but this finished product of a novel still had the ring of 'meant for the screen' coloring all of its pages, and combined with some portions of overly heavy prose...this book took me entirely TOO long to read. You can tell it was originally meant for a somewhat wide audience, with somewhat short chapters and of course our two adolescent protagonists at the helm...but once the allusions to religion, et al got a bit heavy, I had trouble losing myself fully in the creepiness of the premise. Aside from the GENIUS carousel bit (and that part is definitely memorable), the weird and wonderful setting descriptors got a bit long, and many of the passages a bit verbose for my personal taste so it took what could have been a lighter read and made it drag quite a bit.

The flip side to this, however, is that this particular edition has a fascinating 'epilogue' of sorts, with essays from other authors and the history of the book, as well as excerpts from original drafts included and THIS expository content alone was worth the price of admission.

This book took me entirely by surprise. I did not expect to come across a piece of literature published in 1962 that carried with it the delicate way that the human species wades through life; horrors & fears, joyful connections & tenderness. I absolutely adored this book.
 
Bradbury is incredibly skilled at crafting a world wherein the overly succulent detailing of words is essential to the plot in a way that comes as a bit of a point of contention; why did we spend so many paragraphs reading about comparisons, symbolism, metaphors, allegories & imagery? Because it allows us to drown in the town, to become enveloped within the dream that leads Will & Jim through their nightly boyish wanderings in the neighbourhood, it carried us to the solace that was Charles standing in between rows of books. It captured what was to be feared in this story.
 
I admit that it took me a couple of chapters to fully appreciate the purpose of such poetic prose. When one isn’t habituated with reading a story wherein the author absolutely allows themselves to name nouns at length, to describe what might appear to be the tedious shapes that float around scenery; it is a task to allow the mind to read through such long descriptors, such detailed allegory, to find oneself back at the main plot. However, I was always appreciative of Bradbury’s ability to utilize language in such a way as to lead one to become lost within the metaphors. I like to be tricked, to stumble through thoughts—they ask of me to reflect more deeply, to ponder with more profoundness & I will always be appreciative of that.
 
The plot as a whole is magnificent. The characters are intricate in their symbolism & imagery. I wish I could sit & write about all the aspects of this book that I enjoyed but instead, suffice it to say that I will return to this story during another cold October day & find myself immersed in the chilled developments of childhood becoming the morose loneliness which can be adulthood.

This story will remain etched in my mind as one which simmers in the recesses of the subconscious. If I might offer one word of warning regarding this book it is; do not endeavour this reading experience as one which you might hope to grant you deep dark fear. This is an older story & the more obvious ‘horror’ aspects don’t hit quite as tragically in 2021 as they may have in 1962 because one is far more exposed to such physical realities in our time.

However, keeping that in mind I would encourage you to focus on what it might be like to meet what is eminently a fear-invoking person, someone not unlike The Illustrated Man, as Will, Jim & Charles might have. I found it appropriately chilling how delicately the plot treads the fine line between the horrors of fictional monsters & the terrors of developing individuality in human society.

SOMETHING WICKED is a story about two young thirteen year old friends who live next door to each other in a small town, Jim Nightshade born one minute before midnight on October 30th and Will Holloway born one minute after on October 31 HALLOWEEN. Autumn is in the air when the Cooger and Dark's carnival comes to town and creepy things begin to happen, a lightening rod salesman turns into a dwarf, a school teacher becomes young again, the barber is missing and the boys become more and more interested and fascinated sneaking out their windows late at night to watch the spooky events evolve. When they see an old man, Mr. Cooger ride the carousel in reverse and become a young boy, they become frightened and Will finally confesses to his father all the strange events including his encounter with the evil witch surprised that his father believes him. I love the entire book, but especially the relationship that grows between Will and his father when he realizes what he never saw before....that his dad is his hero. Will's dad, Charles, an unhappy man who often speaks of his old age of 54, works cleaning the town library by day and returns at night to read. After Will discloses his secrets about the carnival, Charles discovers Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark have been traveling with their carnival (always in October) since 1846. The evil Mr. Dark now aware of the boys knowledge begins tracking them and the boys go into hiding. Charles finally saves the day when he learns what can finally destroy the EVIL......SMILES, LAUGHTER and HAPPINESS!

Love the Shakespeare quote, "BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES".

The Afterward is also interesting explaining why the book is dedicated to Gene Kelly. Author states that "Singin' in the Rain" was actually a science-fiction musical describing how silent films reinvented themselves as a technology of sound, dreaming a concept and then birthing it....started with a fiction and ended in a science.