Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



When I mulling over whether to read this again (I read it when I was very younger), I came across multiple online reviews decrying Bradbury as out of date; not enjoyable to the modern reader. I don't read much fiction, let along sci-fi/fantasy, so I can't compare him to his current competition. However, as with [a:H.G. Wells|880695|H.G. Wells|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1201281795p2/880695.jpg], I find Bradbury's excellent, imaginative descriptions transcend the genre to be good literature. Consider how he elects to clue us into the importance of October in the prologue to this story of an evil carnival with power of time and form:

"First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn't begun yet. July, well, July's really fine: there's no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June's best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September's a billion years away.

But you take October, now. School's been on a month and you're riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you'll dump on old man Prickett's porch, or the hairy-ape costume you'll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it's around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Hallowe'en will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners."

If anything about datedness is true, I find it in some of his words. I need to imagine his fantastic medicos without being distracted by the archaic "internes" term. Since his time a "monkey pole" is more likely seen at Wright & Filippis than a houseside. But, I don't mind a side trip to the dictionary (I may see these terms in a crossword) and his context for "sough" is better than any dictionary:

"What sort of noise does a balloon make, adrift?

None.

No, not quite. It noises itself, it soughs, like the wind billowing your curtains all white as breaths of foam. Or it makes a sound like the stars turning over in your sleep. Or it announces itself like moonrise and moonset. That last is best: like the moon sailing the universal deeps, so rides a balloon.

How do you hear it, how are you warned? The ear, does it hear? No. But the hairs on the back of your neck, and the peach-fuzz in your ears, they do, and the hair along your arms sings like grasshopper legs frictioned and trembling with strange music. So you know, you feel, you are sure, lying abed, that a balloon is submerging the ocean sky."

Finally, Bradbury may have finally soured me on [a:Dickens, Charles|7179746|Dickens, Charles|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66-251a730d696018971ef4a443cdeaae05.jpg], for so artfully describing why I find his plots beggaring belief:

"‘Boys, you read Dickens?’ Mr. Dark whispered.

Critics hate his coincidences. But we know, don't we? Life's all coincidence. Turn death and happenstance flakes off him like fleas from a killed ox. Look!’"



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