A Summary of Dandelion Wine

Imagine a certain part of town where during the day, it is a very peaceful and calm place to be. However, night time is a different story. The place is dark, spooky, filled with strange noises and the howling wind. It is now a place where young, beautiful women are ruthlessly murdered. There is a place like this in Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. If any sane person had a choice, they definitely wouldn’t traverse across that horrid place, especially right after another death had been committed. A very cocky, foolish person on the other hand would dare to be out at such a time as this. The setting, foreshadowing, and characterization create suspense in Dandelion Wine. The setting helps to create suspense throughout the story. All the murders take place in the ravine where not a single soul dares to venture out at dusk. “Lavinia looked and the ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day; there was a great moving hum, a bumbling and murmuring of creature, insect or plant life. It smelled like a greenhouse of secret vapors and ancient, washed shales and quick sands and always the black dynamo humming. With sparkles like great electricity where fireflies, moved on the air” (Bradbury 65). This is detailing what the ravine is like, day or night; when people either enjoy it or stay far from it. When it is night time, there are hardly any people out, in fear of the “lonely one”. One night, Lavinia and her two friends are going out and there is a murder. They are the only people left walking around. “The hot blue-glass eyes of the mannequins watched as the ladies drifted down the empty river bottom street, their images shimmering in windows like blossoms seen under darkly moving waters” (71). In this quote it’s showing the desertedness of the town right after the “lonely one” had taken another victim. In the day the ravine is perfectly harmless, but as the reader would have found out in a matter of time, at some point in the night the whole town