Title: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Author: Ray Bradbury
Book Length (Audiobook): 9 hours 8 mins
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Genre: Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Classics, Science Fiction
Read Start Date: September 28, 2019
Read Finish Date: October 10, 2019
Brief Summary of the Plot from Goodreads: 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.
This is the second book in the Green Town series.
My Past Reviews:
See my review of Dandelion Wine here.
My Review: I had a really hard time getting into this book. I’m not sure whether it was the monotone voice of the audiobook narrator, or the slowness of the book itself, or maybe even the lengthy prose to describe simple things that seems to be a Bradbury special (or maybe even the combination of the three), but I found myself constantly drifting off onto other thoughts. I had to rewind the audiobook at least five times — often times I would find that I had drifted over for more than 15 minutes (sometime even a whole car ride). Maybe it would have been better to read it as a book or ebook.
I had originally wanted to give this book a 3, but once I started writing this review, I realized I had to give it a 2. Although I eventually got into the story (after reading approximately half the book), I was less than ambivalent about it. I think that this had in large part to do with the format of the book I was reading. The story definitely seemed interesting. An evil and sinister carnival rolls into small town America just in time for Halloween? What’s not to like at first blush?
Notwithstanding the intriguing plot, if I was a reader prone to giving up on books, then I would have given up on this one for sure. It is just too dense for audiobook reading, and my library did not have it available in any other format.
I think that the story had potential to be great (if I was just able to pay attention), so I won’t not recommend it — but I do not recommend the audiobook version.
If you’d like to get more of a balanced opinion, I did read some other blog reviews about the book (below) which had a more positive outtake.
The Legal Alien 
Thanks for the pingback. I agree that Bradbury’s prose is challenging. Sometimes, there’s buried brilliance – sometimes, it’s overheated.
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Thanks for your comment! I found it to be a bit overwhelming when listening as an audiobook. It was very hard to follow at times.
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Thanks for checking out my review and tagging me! I’m not sure I would have enjoyed this as an audiobook either – I really liked the way the sentences looked and the way he turned words on their head, but having to listen to that probably would have confused me so much.
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