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Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown Book 2)

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Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown Book 2) Kindle Edition

by Ray Bradbury (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 6,471 ratings

Book 2 of 3: Greentown

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Few American novels written this century have endured in th heart and mind as has this one-Ray Bradbury's incomparable masterwork of the dark fantastic. A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show's smoke, mazes, and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes -- and the stuff of nightmare.

Book 2 of 3

Greentown
Print length

314 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

William Morrow Paperbacks
Publication date

April 23, 2013
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1857 KB
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God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.
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Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light.
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Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity.
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Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.
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Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.
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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Something Wicked is Avon's latest installment in its ongoing series of reprints of Bradbury's works in quality yet affordable hardcover editions. Appearing in 1962, this is the story of a diabolical carnival that wreaks havoc on the lives of the people of a small Illinois town, much like the one in which Bradbury grew up. This edition also sports a new afterword by the author.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Bradbury's classic 1962 novel is here masterfully read by voice artist Kevin Foley, whose deep tones are well suited to the story's dark characters." ---Library Journal Starred Audio Review

From the Inside Flap

one discovers your secret dream, that one great wish you would do anything for? And what if that someone suddenly makes your dream come true--before you learn the price you have to pay? Something Wicked This Way Comes is the story of two boys who encounter the sinister wonders of Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show. They will soon discover the show's awful mystery--a mystery that will change the life of every person it touches--in this stunning masterwork of dark fantasy by Ray Bradbury.

From the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Kevin Foley has over thirty years' experience in radio and television broadcasting, commercial voice-overs, and audiobook narration. He has recorded over one hundred and fifty audiobooks.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and poet. Among his best-known works are The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

FIRST OF all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn't begun yet. July, well, July's really fine: there's no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June's best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September's a billion years away.

But you take October, now. School's been on a month and you're riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you'll dump on old man Prickett's porch, or the hairy-ape costume you'll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it's around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bed sheets around corners.

But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early.

One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight.

At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street as thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands.

And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more....

(Copyright ) 1998 by Ray Bradbury

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00C2C637I
Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (April 23, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 23, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1857 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 314 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #48,460 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #136 in Contemporary Fantasy Fiction
- #225 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- #357 in Contemporary Literary Fiction

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Ray Bradbury

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In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91, inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, "Live forever!" Bradbury later said, "I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped."

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michael chad cleary

Great for any Bradbury fan!

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2023

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Ray Bradbury is a bit polarizing in my opinion. People either love his work or hate it. As a writer myself I am a fan of his work. I watched the movie many many years before I cracked open the book and I have to say the movie doesn't follow the book very closely. I would go out on a limb and say a fan of the book may be disappointed in the movie and a fan of the movie may be left scratching their head over the book.

Bradbury has a tendency to be very poetic in his complex descriptions in this book leaving a leisure reader to likely be put off by his wording. I don't consider this to be light reading or a children's book. It is my opinion the movie was much scarier than the book--something I find to be unusual. One particular feature of this novel is the short chapters and large print. I don't care to read chapters that drone on for twenty five or thirty pages because I fell as though I'm getting nowhere. Bradbury does a great job of moving the story and the book along with the chapter layout.

You will get lost in this story. It's bizarre, it's fantastical, and very much what one would expect from RB if you have read any of his other work. The dialogue is a bit hard to follow because it phases in and out of spoken and internal. Will seems to be the main character as he is in the movie with the reader being exposed primarily to his thoughts and actions without excluding too much of the other characters. In many ways I feel the movie does a much better job of revealing Mr. Dark's character than the book, but this may be due to RB's goal of concealing that personality.

I would highly recommend this book to someone looking to be challenged by a work that fluctuates frequently between prose and a near poetic style. Believe me it will challenge you! It is a unique work that demonstrates Bradbury's willingness to break the normal practice of fiction writing. If you are a writer I would suggest you pick this one up to perhaps inspire you to break out of some of your own rigid and routine habits.

11 people found this helpful

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dalethepaleone

An American Classic

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2013

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Ray Bradbury, like the picturesque old libraries or city halls found in many a marginalized American small town, was so ubiquitous that I often felt he was taken for granted. He was such a fixture of the literary landscape for so long, lauded as one of our great prose stylists and narrative dreamers so often, that it was easy to forget he was there. Comfy old chair-like ubiquity aside, Mr. Bradbury's work remained moving, vital, and fresh right until the very end.

Something Wicked This Way Comes has been a favorite novel of mine since my early twenties, when I finally got around to reading it. On the surface, Bradbury's nostalgiac Middle American nightmare is simply a dark and evocative fable of childhood; a precursor to every evil-threatens-a-small-town novel written by Stephen King or Dean Koontz or anyone who followed in their footsteps. It is the story of two boys--Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade--twelve years old, on the cusp of adulthood, suddenly faced with temptation and damnation when a devilish autumn carnival invades their picturesque little Midwest town. Little by little, Will and Jim discover that the delights promised by the carnival (led by the sinister Mr. Dark, covered in moving tattoos representing the many souls he's dragged to perdition) are thorny roses to say the least, wishes granted with terrible fine print folded into their infernal contracts.

In deft, evocative, poetic prose, Bradbury paints a vivid and memorable portrait of a serene if static world invaded by a malign and alien influence, insidious precisely because it uses the all-too-human frailties of the townsfolk against them. Perhaps most impressive is the master's ability to entice the reader with nostalgia, then use those very objects of nostalgia to instill pity and terror equal to any Greek tragedy. For a man renowned for his love of autumn, carnivals, and Halloween with all its funhouse trappings, Bradbury succeeds magnificently in turning the objects of his affection (and ours) into vessels of fear. This is, perhaps, a central aspect of Something Wicked's success: by turning the objects of nostalgia and affection into devil's snares for our fragile, aging souls, Bradbury reminds us that what we love can damn us as well as redeem us. The difference between one and the other often balances on a knife's edge between ecstatic self-destruction and ascetic, self-punishing virtuousness.

Folded into Bradbury's meditation on childhood fears and adult regrets, one also finds a simple, elegant consideration of how goodness and happiness rarely walk hand in hand. Telling his father that he considers him a good man, and learning that Charles sees himself that way as well, Will is forced to ask, "Then, Dad, why aren't you happy?"

Charles's response: "Since when did you think being good meant being happy?"

Seeing that his son doesn't understand, Charles tries to elaborate on just what trying to be good has cost him. "I was so busy wrestling myself two falls out of three," Charles says, "I figured I couldn't marry until I had licked myself good and forever... Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else... [but] you take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That's you, Will..."

If anyone's ever written a better paen to marriage and child-rearing, I don't know what it is. Will's conversation with his father, and the revelations both share, strike me as beautiful and true.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Ray Bradbury was a national treasure. Although he created a vast and beautiful body of work, in this simple, lovely, spooky little novel, made up of barely 80,000 words, he not only encapsulated the terrible moments that portend adulthood--the realization that grown-ups are fragile and flawed; the reality of one's own, eventual death--but also their obverse: the moment in our adulthood when we finally realize just how far behind us childhood, safety, and dreams without regrets lie. Two boys realize that a world of compromise and moral hazard awaits them, followed by death; an old man realizes that death is nearer than ever before, and that the compromises and moral hazards left in his wake make its approach all the more tragic.

And yet, in the midst of all this darkness, hope endures. That it never comes across as a cloying, false, or flashy hope is further evidence of the late master's genius. The silver lining to Bradbury's thunderclouds is simple laughter; a willful outpouring of joy and delight, to light the darkness and defy the doldrums of inexorable time and lurking mortality. "Everything that happens before Death is what counts" Bradbury tells us, and we can only believe him. From the realization that we're all in the same boat--that we all suffer the same doubts, the same regrets, the same self-deceptions--we draw some small measure of strength, and find some small measure of hope, even in the face of oblivion. As the book's Moby Dick-derived epigraph proclaims: "I know not what lies ahead, but whatever it is, I'll go to it laughing."

15 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Excellent!

Reviewed in Canada on August 20, 2023

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Incredible book with a nice soft cover. Definitely be re-reading it.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Books

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 8, 2024

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One of my favourites - 'Something Wicked this way comes' is a haunting, coming of age tale of two friends and their maturation, paradoxically cementing and irrevocably changing their relationship. Ray Bradbury's writing challenges, excites and invites the reader to observe their battle with unknown and threatening forces when the circus comes to their town.

Fernando A. O. Prieto

Bom livro

Reviewed in Brazil on October 28, 2018

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Gostei, embora haja outros livros do autor doas quais tenha gostado mais (por exemplo, "O homem ilustrado").É para os fãs do gênero e do autor.

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Anaseg

Fantasía oscura para disfrutar a tope

Reviewed in Spain on September 14, 2019

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Una maravillosa historia.

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9Cows

Adventure of a lifetime!

Reviewed in India on February 11, 2017

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A tale of two diametric opposite, yet inseparable teenage boys, complementing in more ways than the two sides of a coin, yet dissimilar in more ways than a mammal and a reptile. This is the story of two friends; one, an almost ideal boy, another, a dark almost sociopath teen. A dark carnival's arrival to town and it's impact on the town people's life.

You begin - "First of all, it was October, a rare month for the boys." and you are intoxicated. This is a fantastical adventure that explores the frailties of the human will and nature when confronted by desire and greed. The story dwells upon the trivial human desires and how easy it is to lure someone to do the unthinkable with just a mere promise of their desire's fulfillment. This is the story of a boy whose strange attraction to these dark powers is bringing himself closer to his destruction with every passing page and his friend's determination to not lose him.

In this book Bradbury creates an exhilarating atmosphere that leads to a sleepless night and cover to cover reading session. The language is spellbinding too. I suggest this book to readers of all ages, there is enough for everyone here.

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Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown Book 2) Kindle Edition

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown Book 2)

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