Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) by Ray Bradbury

This review's probably going to make a lot of people mad. I'm sorry if you like this book; really, I am. But I couldn't stand to read any more of it. And yes, I know I'm just some random idiot on a website. Far be it from me to criticize a legendary writer like Ray Bradbury, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Bradbury's writing is so egregiously fat with purple prose that if you had showed me some of these paragraphs and told me that a try-hard high schooler had written them I'd have believed you. Seriously, even I don't try this hard to be artful and profound in my dollar-store-website reviews. I found myself reading some of these lines multiple times just trying to grasp what the fuck was even going on in the damn scene since Bradbury had described it in the most obtuse, impenetrable way—for the sake of no more than making the sentence as amusing and pretty as possible. I can only hear about a tattoo artist described as seated rapturously alongside his ceaseless melancholy, stinging himself with a dagger of bees! so many times before my eyes roll themselves right out of their sockets. In the beginning I was struck by Bradbury's endless, artful adjectives and his rambling nature, considering the book nearly more poetry than prose. By page 100, though, they were beginning to wear me out. And by page 150, they were absolutely unbearable. Maybe there's a decent story in here somewhere, but I couldn't dig my way through the piles of lard to find it.

I realize this is very much up to personal preference. If you like extremely stylized prose then you'll probably love this novel. I didn't hate every second of it, but I do hate it.

⭐