Episode 4: Melting Puddles of Lime and Strawberry

“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.” opens Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, the second in a loose trilogy set in Green Town, Illinois. Green Town is a stand in for Bradbury’s real life hometown of Waukegan, the apotheosis of American Midwestern Nostalgia. If a road atlas of pop culture existed, Green Town, Illinois would be just up the road a piece from Haddonfield. In fact, Haddonfield’s “Babysitter Murders” happened exactly 50 years after the events of tonight’s story: The Whole Town’s Sleeping.

It sometimes appears under a different name (“The Ravine”) and it’s one of a number of previously published short stories Ray combined to build Dandelion Wine, the first novel of the Green Town trilogy (Farewell Summer, published a few years before his death, is the last). It’s sort of Bradbury’s take on a campfire story, and the name of the killer was supposedly taken from a real life burglar that terrorized Waukegan in Ray’s youth. The story takes place in 1928.

It’s a slow burn, but burn it does. And the fire is the only light to see by.

Hosted by The Fundertaker

Music by Gothic Husband

40 minutes