I first read this during my teenaged Bradbury binge and loved it. It spoke to me personally in a way that, say, The Martian Chronicles, did not. Doug Spaulding may as well have been me.

The second time I read it, in my twenties, all I really remembered was two out of three early episodes (the tennis shoes and the forest picnic) from right at the beginning of the book. Hence I was expecting a childhood nostalgia fest and got a bit of a shock. The book has a dark current running through it.

This time round, I still remembered the tennis shoes and the picnic - but also that it was dark in some way - people kept dying, at least.

And it's true; Doug Spaulding experiences two revelations in one long Illinois summer. The first is that he is alive. It's the first time that he's paid the fact any attention and it's exciting. Everything has an extra zing, even things that had been fairly zingy in previous years. The second is that people keep dying; old folks, murder victims, even folk-legendary characters. They were alive - now they are not. And Doug is alive - so one day he will not be either. Doug recognises his own mortality, is greatly shaken and takes one step closer to adulthood in his now old, no longer magical tennis shoes.

I don't think many people face up to their own mortality at the age of Doug Spaulding in this book, but Bradbury genuinely might have. He's the guy who wrote a story about noticing - really becoming aware of - one's skeleton. Noticing things with greater intensity than normal folks is a great part of Bradbury's genius.

The book is constructed in an odd fashion. Being an early novel by one of the greatest short-story writers ever, it resembles a collection of short stories sewn together to make up a novel. Somehow it works - perhaps because it has a novel's coherence of theme stitching it all together. It's also a brilliant evocation of mid-western small town life circa 1928. Just not nearly as nostalgic as one might expect.