Something Wicked This Way Comes

Last night I finished reading the book Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. The book was first published in 1962 and is set during the last week of October in the small town of Green Town, Illinois. It tells the story of two 13 year old boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, who were born minutes apart, live next door to each other and have been best friends all their lives. The two boys are intrigued when a strange carnival, Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, arrives in town, and before long the entire town is enraptured by the strange magic of the carnival, which promises to restore youth and fulfil everyone's deepest wishes, but Jim and Will discover the carnival's dark side and the horrific price that must be paid for the granted wishes. The book which has become acclaimed as one of the classics of the horror and fantasy genre is written, like many Bradbury books, in a very unique style that mixes in heavy amounts of sentimentality and nostalgia, along with very poetic descriptions, which is an extremely difficult style to pull off and to get the balance right, and even Bradbury isn't successful all the time but mostly it really works well. I think the Bradbury style is one of the reasons why they very rarely adapted, successfully, for film. The style is really beautiful when it's read, but to hear it spoken as dialogue sounds very stilted and artificial. Actually, Something Wicked This Way Comes started out as a screenplay Bradbury wrote for Gene Kelly. Kelly loved the script but couldn't get financing for it, and so Bradbury turned it into the novel. The book was turned into a film in 1983 by Disney, which Bradbury described as: "Not a great film, no, but a decently nice one."

I was back at work again, but only for one day before the weekend so that is good. Although it was pretty weird being back in after two days off for just one day and then having another couple of days off. The problem is that Friday's are so difficult to get off work now, and so I tend to go for days in the middle of the week now.