October Reading Group selection (redux)

On Monday, October 31, Halloween! NOT Thursday, October 27, at 7:00 pm, the Book Beat reading group will meet online to discuss Something Wicked This Way Comes, a 1962 dark fantasy novel by Ray Bradbury. Copies are available instore at a 15% dicount, or may be purchased online at Bookshop.org. If you’d like to attend, please send us your name and phone number and we will add your email to our reading grup. On the morning of the next meeting on October 31, a link for the meeting will be sent to your email as a reminder. Please try and attend 5-10 minutes early so we can begin on time. PS: Most meetings are scheduled the last Wednesday of the month, unless noted otherwise.  

For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Two boys will discover the secret of its smoke, mazes, and mirrors; two friends who will soon know all too well the heavy cost of wishes…and the stuff of nightmares.

“Few novels have endured in the heart and memory as has Ray Bradbury’s unparalleled literary masterpiece Something Wicked This Way Comes. Scary and suspenseful, it is a timeless classic in the American canon.” —The Guardian

“Bradbury’s prose is musical and hypnotic, fully engaging the senses and emotions. This is a book, once opened, that truly makes the real world disappear.” –Sci-Fi Weekly

“Bradbury gives us a truly gripping and insightful portrayal of evil. It is more than transgressions. It is the darkness, the nothingness that consumes, that plays on and distorts human desire, shriveling lives. The story depicts the webs of illusion that hold those who give way to it.” —Bonbon Books

“This book is thrilling, scary, and, most important, wise in the ways of man. Bradbury well understands that evil is such a powerful force not because it is so awful, but because it is so attractive.” –Brothers Judd.com

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all. Secondly, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.
–Ray Bradbury

About the author: During a career that spanned seventy-plus years, Ray Bradbury wrote more than 400 short stories and nearly fifty books across a variety of genres. He also penned numerous poems, essays, plays, operas, teleplays, and screenplays, making him one of the most productive and admired writers of our time, as well as one of the most widely translated in the world.

His enduring novels, novelized story cycles, and story collections include The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The October Country (1955), Dandelion Wine (1957), A Medicine for Melancholy (1959), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).