Book Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Ray Bradbury (Bradbury)

 

Something Wicked This Way Comes is about boyhood and the turn of the season from late summer to the suddenly cool breezes of late October. A carnival arrives in the middle of the night amid strange omens that excite two go-everywhere-together boys. Does the carnival hold a terrible secret? Of course it does!

 

What I love about Bradbury’s writing is the near-constant feeling of exhilaration whether he’s describing everyday things or strange happenings. His writing feels unconstrained. He’s always dancing like no one’s watching and this makes for such a fun reading experience! This story in particular felt like the distilled essence of every small town Stephen King story about children and a few adults confronting a great evil, just with a lighter-hearted tone. Of course the influence is the other way around: Something Wicked This Way Comes was a major influence for King’s sense of story and probable inspiration for iconic details like Pennywise peeking out of the sewer grate.

 

I read a 2017 trade paperback edition which includes a selection of essays from famous authors (including King & Atwood), plus notes on how this novel came to be. I learned that at one point it was a musical screenplay in the hands of Gene Kelly as he unsuccessfully tried to find a producer to back the film. Beyond the one literal song-and-dance number still on the page toward the end, it’s fun to spot the other places where dance breaks would naturally fit in.

 

Keeping all this praise in mind, the experience is tempered by pervasive sexism, racism, and ableism. It reminded me of the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not books as they existed in my childhood of the late 1980s. The carnival has a “freak show” where people are exoticized for their ethnicity and medical conditions. Women are characterized as “warm clocks” whom men both envy and hate for their ability to produce children. So my recommendation is that this can be a book worth reading, so long as you know what you’re getting into.

 

( Wikipedia page for the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes ) | ( official Ray Bradbury web site )

 

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

See also: Scott C.’s review of Something Wicked This Way Comes in the October 2004 Staff Recommendations on the libraries’ BookGuide resource pages!

 

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