I love Bradbury. His talents, especially the ones which bend to the darkening, orange winds of October, are beautiful, poetic odes, often to the nostalgic aura of childhood, adolescence and the subsequent bridge to adulthood. And his talents are in full display in "Something Wicked This Way Comes."
With this novel, Bradbury uses his poetry to write a love letter to his childhood, All Hallow's Eve, and how the rites of the autumn season had such an influence over his life. At once, this is the story of two friends growing up alongside each other, facing, for the first time, the lurking death which hangs over all of our autumn's. And, this is a story about one of the boy's father's growth while accepting-- and winning?-- over this lurking specter of death and evil.
The circus which travels by night and its cast of weird characters is so eloquently representative of fear of the coming winter, and Bradbury does not waste one character, one mirror-house, one twisted carousel to show us this. To breathe life into these characters, Bradbury unleashes his poetry, his own way of talking that so beautifully takes one back through years, to a place both reminiscent of our own youth, and a magnificently rendered historical moment of a small town, rural 1920s harvest time.
I love this novel.
