Something Wicked This Way Comes Book

Mark Twain famously died in 1910 and Ray Bradbury was born ten years later in 1920. And on that day, the shadow of Samuel Clemens touched a mark on the baby's head, and nearby the shade of Charles Dickens looked on in approval.

Bradbury is the bridge to our past, our bright and strong and colorful past. Twain's world was as bold as a young America, full of steamboats, and fishing holes and jumping frogs. Bradbury, no less an American, but a resident of the October Country, revealed the long shadow of Twain's history, echoing away like a train whistle far gone. As a citizen of Fall, Bradbury knows to beware the Autumn People and knows them and how to describe them.

In Bradbury's October country tale Something Wicked This Way Comes, first published in 1962, Tom and Huck have become Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, one with a birthday a minute before midnight October 30th, the other born a minute after midnight, Halloween morning. Injun Joe is Mr. Dark, the illustrated man, the proprietor of the shadowy carnival that rolls into town every twenty or thirty years.

Bradbury's rich poetic prose is what was described by Robin Williams in Dead Poet's Society, alive and Whitman-like vibrant and descriptive with a swaggering electricity. The author draws us in with his illustration of Green Town; here a simile, like the sound of leaves racing down a late summer's sidewalk, there a metaphor, a witch's brew dark and murky, filled with spider webs and green frog smiles, and the color of a ghosts sigh.

In Mr. Dark, Bradbury has given us one of literature's great villains, but drawn by the Grandmaster with empathy born of long familiarity.

One of the great stories from a great storyteller and a book that everyone should read.

*** 2020 reread - Bradbury's prose is timeless and ceases to be magical, he's the master of metaphor.

This time around I focused on the friendship between Will and Jim and the relationship Will had with his father.

"Beware the Autumn People" - Stephen King must have been inspired by Mr. Dark and his carnival when he wrote about the pain vampires in Doctor Sleep.

The soliloquy by Mr. Holloway, explaining the genesis and motivations of Dark, followed immediately and ominously by the dialogue between Holloway and Dark, with the boys, Jim and Will, hiding was literary gold.

Bradbury's rich prose must be savored and enjoyed like a heady brew.