Something Wicked This Way Comes

I didn't see the movie version of this until I was an adult, and I really disliked it. After reading the book, I have more sympathy for the filmmakers, since it sure SEEMS like there's enough imagery in it to make for a great movie. But in reality, everything that makes the book great is unfilmable — it's all the passages where Bradbury rhapsodizes about youth in small town America; or explains the sense of indescribable loss that comes from being reminded of your age; or sets the stakes for a tense scene not just as the fate of a young boy or his middle-aged father, but a battle between good and evil that goes back for millennia.

I was surprised to see in Bradbury's afterword that the story spent so much of its life in the form of various screenplays, since most of its essence seems to be in Bradbury's flowery descriptions (which were at some times overwrought, which along with some period-appropriate but still unfortunate sexist mentality, are my only complaints about the book).