Something Wicked This Way Comes

[reread in 2016]

Bradbury is a fucking wizard. I couldn't remember why I kept this paperback, and then I reread it and I'd forgotten the way he writes is just so poetic and evocative and melancholy. Individual sentences constantly stopping me in my tracks, demanding to be read twice or three times, sometimes out loud.

The story itself is scary and sad and gripping, drawing its emotional power from a deep well of serious thoughts about life: aging, and what is lost (or gained); friendship, in all its complexities; adolescence, with all its strange intensity and shadowy fears; the goodness or evil inherent in all of us, and the utter strangeness of time and life, and how we meet it.