What a lovely darkly ominous opening:
The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied. (p. 5)
This is how Chapter 1 starts out, with a brief prologue that gives us the time of year, October, and warnings of Halloween coming early that year.
I remember Bradbury from the fifties and early sixties; Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone. It surprises me a bit that my mom and dad watched these, and now, too late to ask them if they enjoyed the bizarre, which one of them handed down their genes for delight in the macabre. Bradbury sets a scene that’s always a little bit askew. Maple-lined streets with a Dodge or an Olds in the driveways of neat little white Capes or Federal Colonials with huge railed-in porches that led up to oak doors with etched curlicued glass. Sometimes a Pontiac, sometimes a Ford station wagon sat stuffed with a mom and a dad and two loud laughing boys in plaid shirts and jeans; their little priss sister in pink organdy.
Something, though, is a bit out of order, and Dad may be dead by the end of the show.
In SWTWC, the salesman tells the boys that one of their houses will be hit and destroyed, and since they have no money, gives them free a lightning rod engraved with signs and symbols of different languages. The boys are best friends: blond, amiable Will Halloway and dark-haired, secretive and gutsy Jim Nightshade. It is Nightshade’s house that will take the hit, so says the salesman, and Will talks Jim into putting the rod up on the roof.
Two innocent boys laying on a lawn in October, proud of their summer days spent. Peaceful, or so it would seem, until Bradbury draws a character to upset their lives.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology