Countdown to Halloween: By the pricking of my thumbs...

“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.”

Indeed. So begins Ray Bradbury's iconic 1962 dark fantasy novel. Hard as it may be to believe, it's true that I've never read it! In the early '90s I made my way through a handful of Bradbury's other classics - Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Illustrated Man, etc. - but Wicked has simply sat on my shelf uncracked and unloved. Every October since then I've glanced at it high upon my bookshelves and thought, "Time to read Something Wicked This Way Comes," but I never did. Until now - but I'm barely on page 40 as I write this entry (Jim and Will are watching the ghostly silent carnival men set up tents at 3:00 a.m.).

So in lieu of an actual book review, I will just post some of the wonderful covers of various editions of the book from over the years.

This 1970s' Bantam edition is the copy I'm reading now.

The always-weird JK Potter cover was part of a series of reprints in the late '80s.

A UK edition not quite as fantastical as the others.

I remember seeing the Disney adaptation of it about 20 years ago and, of course, can recall nothing of it!

A 1999 hardcover edition.

Something Wicked still, happily, turns up on school reading lists, as do several of his other major works. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some reading of my own to do.

This post is part of the Countdown to Halloween.

For more great Ray Bradbury book covers, see the wonderful coffee-table tome Bradbury: An Illustrated Life.