SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

Confession: I hadn’t read anything by Ray Bradbury, Pasadena’s most famous author, not even Fahrenheit 451 (I started it once and then got distracted and moved to something else). I KNOW. So I was excited to read this one, which sounded perfect for Halloweentime (demonic carnival!). But…I was a little disappointed. It’s poetically written, but at times almost too much so; it seemed opaque or strangely abstract and wasn’t as scary as I’d expected. Maybe that’s the fault of my own expectations (I get that it’s more a coming-of-age story than a horror tale), but it paled in comparison to Shirley Jackson.