Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

 

Um. I remember reading this in high school, or maybe college, or maybe right after I dropped out of college, and thinking it was good but liking Bradbury's short stories better. I might still hold out for some of Bradbury's short stories being some of the best fiction written in English, but I might not have been in a place to appreciate how fucking good this novel is. Just a few years older than Jim and Will, so it's easier to look down on them the way one does "the little kids"; no where near old enough to appreciate Charles Halloway as a character--he's much more important than I remember most people thinking. (I didn't read the stuff about the novel in the back of this edition, I just read it, thanks, I'll think my own thoughts.) The story here might be a little clunky, and spectacularly dated, even in the 1950s/1960s when Bradbury was writing it, but there's some real grit and blood and fear, here; the characters aren't quite interchangeable, but they're very much either Jim or Will, or they're someone else (Will's dad, Charles, is a bit of an exception to this). The villains are mostly bad because they're bad, pretty explicitly. The prose, though, oh my gawds the prose is enough to give anyone who writes fiction in English fucking imposter syndrome. These days I don't normally crank my prose to quite those heightened altitudes, but Bradbury makes it look so effortless, so tempting, I fear I am already lost.