It’s a strange facet of its own success, but ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ has almost become a cliche; a travelling carnival calls into a sleepy plains town and, of course, the ringmaster will be a sinister, threatening figure, promising gifts to the unwary that come at the cost of something much greater; there will be freaks, unfortunate, tortured individuals offered up to the ridicule of the rubes; and there will be two town boys, living on the cusp of puberty, running semi-wild and drawn to the carnival as irresistibly as, well, as boys to a travelling show.

Bradbury’s original is still wonderful, although the writer’s word painting grows a little tedious sometimes; I presume he is a fan of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as he imports many of Hopkins’ techniques into his prose, but where alliterative word runs work beautifully in the concentrated explosion of the Windhover, they become repetitive through 250 pages of prose. A writer can become too intoxicated by words. But the strength of the story and the imagery carried me through, with a little skimming here and there, to the end.