Over-written-underplotted-random-hyphenated sea grey, cloud flying, gold omniscient spider legged nothing at all. ( )

Nostalgia, baby. ( )

Unsettling from the first page to the last. ( )

Month of October 2022 - Spooky Classics

“Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town #2)” by Ray Bradbury (1962; 1990 - PDF Internet Archive FREE read) 228 pages.

Link to book:

https://archive.org/details/somethingwickedt0000brad

Setting: Green Town, Illinois

This is the second of three books in the Green Town series by Ray Bradbury…and a pretty darn good one. Ray Bradbury’s writing style is quite unique and sometimes very complex. I definitely have to find a nice quiet spot and fully focus to get into his stories. There were a few spots where I thought he rambled on a bit too long, and I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. But, once he got back to the dialogue and action, the story immediately picked up again, and the pages kept turning. Bradbury did great setting up the scene and atmosphere and the feel of excitement with a circus in town. And, I have to say, it is most interesting to read the kind of evil different people can conjure up from their own minds.

Evil only has the power that we give it. (p. 204)

This line pretty much sums up the main point of the story.

A circus train, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, rolls into town at 3 o’clock in the morning…the witching hour. Only three people seemed to have heard it arriving. Two 14-year-old friends, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, and Will’s father, Charlie. They hear the calliope music playing. The boys sneak out to check it out and begin to see some odd and sinister things taking place. They learn this isn’t your everyday, normal circus. They are discovered snooping around and now see too much and are being hunted down by these evil circus characters.

This circus seemed to attract certain types of people in order to entrap them into a time-lapse on the merry-go-round, bringing them either forward in time, making them older, or back in time, making them younger. People were lured to this evil circus by their greatest fears and wants. Jim had more of a wild, curious and defiant personality and was drawn to the merry-go-round, more than Will. The merry-go-round was magical in giving you your greatest wish, but, with that wish comes also all your greatest fears: past, present and future. The boys learn that turning back time or moving forward in the future never turned out the way one thinks.

As the story moved along, they all seemed to learn more about themselves and the fears that were driving their lives. They eventually would have to come to terms with those fears or be drawn into the world of the dead and the traveling circus.

GREEN TOWN SERIES

Dandelion Wine (#1) - Read in 2020
Something Wicked This Way Comes (#2) - Read in 2022
Farewell Summer (#3) - TBR ( )

3.5. I should have used Fahrenheit 451 as my gateway. ( )