Book Thoughts - Something Wicked This Way Comes

Another Turn, Another Turn

Book Thoughts is me rambling and reviewing about a book a read recently. This week’s book:

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Another Turn, Another Turn

Published:1962

Read: February 4, 2024 - April 6, 2024

This is a book to be read and read again, to be lived in, to spin once more the carousel of language and horror and philosophy. Again and again, till death takes us away from the tale, rather than it away from us.

This novel took me a while to read: two months. It is not a long book, but it was not one I wished to leave.

Sometime the poetic language felt a bore, or aided in me falling asleep if I dared start reading too far after getting to bed, but it always drew me back in. If words did not evoke an image in my mind like the clearer, simpler text of some authors, they always evoked feelings. A flavor and a soul live in this book that are inescapable.

The horror may be lost in the beauty of it all. Life and death. Horrors and goodness. It is a novel that is October, autumn, the chill in the air and the beginning of the survival of winter. It is a novel alive.

This book may not make me a better person. But it may help my writing. And it has made me a better reader. This book must have been written with love, though all the horror and the discussions of life and death and aging, there is love. A love of boyhood and of life and of the small town. there is even love for the carnival, though not for the one brought to us in the book. Not Mr. Dark's carnival. Not the hidden lusts of the people of October.

The only Bradbury I have read thus far includes The Martian Chronicles, some of which I read, most of which I listened to, and Zen in the Art of Writing. In the latter of the two, Bradbury instilled such a lust and joy in me for writing that even though I read the book months ago, have written much since, and read other books on writing, it is still the greatest. It is because of that book and Bradbury's enthusiasm in it, and Stephen King's own enthusiasm for this novel, that I read this dark classic. It was a bookstore purchase. Serendipitous. in the Sci fi section, near whatever I was looking for but which remained unpurchased, I found this beautiful paperback copy of Something Wicked. It was not special, nor cheap, but something about it drew me to purchase the book. Months later, I am glad I did. This is a book to live in. the language steeped like a fine tea, for the perfect amount of time. It is a world I know, for I lived it as well as read it. It is a world I look to revisit. Not for plot, nor character, but for the place. This novel put me in a place more than any other in recent memory. I was in Greentown, though I could not have named the town during my reading of it. I was in the Midwest, in the cool of October, so very different from the spring chill I read the book during, I heard the carnival and smelled the food and tasted that sweet sick in the autumn air of the dying leaves and the wind's bite. I was in Something Wicked This Way Comes. Rare is the novel that makes one abide it and it alone. It took effort to read this book sometimes, but only because of the depth of the investment in reading such a book.

This is a story I loved. Honestly as I sit here, steeping in the post book haze one gets after a great novel, writing my thoughts as they come to me, not letting time sit for an instance. I cannot tell you how I fell into this book. I'm not certain it hit this hard at any point, save for the end, for the totality of the picture it provides.

Did it scare me? No.

Did it thrill me? Yes.

Will I return for another ride on the timeless carousel? Without a doubt.

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Love ya!

Max