Still reading and totally digging Ray Bradbury’s incomparable book about Halloween, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Chapter Ten begins this way:

JUST AFTER midnight.

Shuffling footsteps.

Along the empty street came the lightning-rod salesman, his leather valise swung almost empty in his baseball-mitt hand, his face at ease. He turned a corner and stopped.

Paper-soft white moths tapped at an empty store window, looking in.

And in the window, like a great coffin boat of star-colored glass, beached on two sawhorses lay a chunk of Alaska Snow Company ice chopped to a size great enough to flash in a giant’s ring.

And sealed in this ice was the most beautiful woman in the world.

The lightning-rod salesman’s smile faded.

In the dreaming coldness of ice like someone fallen and slept in snow avalanches a thousand years, forever young, was this woman.

She was as fair as this morning and fresh as tomorrow’s flowers and lovely as any maid when a man shuts up his eyes and traps her, in cameo perfection, on the shell of his eyelids.

The lightning-rod salesman remembered to breathe.

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (p. 42). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Now, come on. You gotta admit that’s fantastic writing.

This is why I love the book so much, and why I read it every year.

In October.

Do yourself a favor and buy a copy of it here.