Something Wicked This Way Comes

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I haven't read a lot of Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, but Something Wicked This Way Comes popped up on some list of spooky books or maybe an NPR Books Review in which a new book was compared to Something Wicked This Way Comes - who knows. Sci-fi is usually not my schtick (but fantasy is, apparently? Wizards are much cooler than aliens), so that may account for Bradbury's notable absence on my bookshelves. My October reading calendar always includes a re-read of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and The Raven, but I try to find an additional paranormal- or death-related book to add in. Last year it was Mary Roach's Spook. I got Something Wicked This Way Comes for a Christmas present, maybe 2018 or 2017 (I am still reading books I bought/received in 2007. My TBR list is several hundred books long. The stack of books IN MY HOUSE that I own but have not read yet numbered in the seventies this year. So, taking a year or two to read a book is not bad for me). I wanted to read it this spring, but held off for September/October. Which was a perfect decision. This was just the right amount of spooky for me - it was very atmospheric and alarming, but I won't be too freaked out to get up to pee in the middle of the night or to go into the basement when my husband isn't home. Something Wicked This Way Comes follows two young boys, both born on the cusp of Halloween. Will Halloway is a golden boy, blonde-white hair, blue eyes, born one minute before midnight October 30, and he is always good and pure, as much as a boy who sneaks out of his window and steals plums and peaches off his neighbors' trees can be. His best friend, Jim Nightshade, is dark of hair, with green eyes, born to a single (widowed?) mother one minute after midnight on October 31. Jim is all spark and wildness and one gets the feeling that his future could very easily go either way. His goodness - the thing that stops him from joining some 1950s gang with slicked-back hair and one of those combs that look like a pocket knife - comes entirely from Will. Jim, according to Will's dad, "wears black ten-gallon hats and reads books to fit. Middle name's Moriarty, right, Jim? Any day now he'll move up from Fu Manchu to Machiavelli here - medium-size dark fedora. Or over along to Dr. Faustus - extra large black Stetson. That leaves the white-hat boys to you, Will. Here's Gandhi. Next door is St. Thomas. And on the next level, well... Buddha." Jim and Will's sleepy small town is rocked when, on a stormy night in October, a carnival - Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show rolls into town. Honest to God, this sounds like exactly the kind of carnival I'd love. There's a magic carousel and a mirror maze that is, in a way, haunted. Thankfully, no evil clowns. I'd have had to put this one down immediately. Jim and Will, poised on the verge of puberty, have to confront scenarios so frightening that the grown-ups in their town quail before them. At its heart, this is a story about childhood and being a child at heart, and about adulthood and how no one gets there unscathed. And how, in the end, the grass isn't always greener on the other side.

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