Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a unique reading experience for me.

The writing jumps around haphazardly, repeats, skips, dances around, delivers.

The story, nestled in language, language used so cleverly as to make itself known by refusing the mundane.

Complete sentences few. Commas, so many commas, commas where you want semi-colons, as though the sentences are a runaway train and there's no time for semi-colons, only commas, it's the only pause that can be afforded.

The limited dialogue brings the story back to reality, and injects fear into it by creating a very real presence for the menace that is Mr Dark and his ominous carnival of terrors.

Two boys, Will and Jim, are caught up, haunted, chased by these bizarre characters that we never really understand yet absolutely appreciate.

The terror is subtle, tangled in description, insinuation, allusion, repetition. Personification. Similes and symbols that somehow still manage to come together and express the horror of the situation, causing some very real chills.

It was so beautifully written.

I thought I'd be lost by the language but here I am, unable to get its voice out of my head. Borrowing its patterns and thinking about the individual trees that created this forest of nightmares.

Meanwhile, this is one hella creepy story.

I'll be turning this one over in my head for a little while, I think. So brilliantly written, and so much better than I was expecting. The story great but the true genius here is the way the story is told.

Highly recommend.

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