A carnival should be all growls, roars like timberlands stacked, bundled, rolled and crashed, great explosions of lion dust, men ablaze with working anger, pop bottles jangling, horse buckles shivering, engines and elephants in full stampede through rains of sweat while zebras neighed and trembled like cage trapped in cage.
But this was like old movies, the silent theater haunted with black-and-white ghosts, silvery mouths opening to let moonlight smoke out, gestures made in silence so hushed you could feel the wind fizz the hair on your cheeks.
- Title: Something Wicked This Way Comes
- Author: Ray Bradbury
- Genre: Horror/Fantasy
- Year: 1962
Something Wicked This Way Comes is the quintessential Ray Bradbury novel, one that combines the many threads and themes of his lifelong work in a book that is equal parts weird tale, small town reminiscence, and celebration of life. It stands alongside The October Country as the purest expression of Bradbury’s brand of horror-fantasy, something that combines the supernatural with real and relatable human fears, inflected with an autumnal style that blends exuberance with bittersweet nostalgia.
This is a novel about growing up, and growing old, but ultimately about seizing hold of the life you have and living it. Best friends Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade are boys on the cusp of adulthood in the small town of Green Town, Illinois, and their ordinary world of boyhood adventures and philosophies is drawn with a familiarity and enthusiasm by Bradbury that rivals the best coming-of-age novels. So too does Bradbury take pains to distinguish his two protagonists, Will the innocent and Jim the world-hungry, and their different personas determine the way they experience the sinister and seductive carnival that steals into town one October night.
Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show is the dark carnival that menaces our protagonists. Rolling into town in the dead of night on a black train whistling a funeral dirge — an event witnessed by Will and Jim — from the start it’s clear that this circus is no ordinary troupe of entertainers. Will and Jim soon stumble upon the Shadow Show’s dark secrets, and come to be hunted by Messieurs Cooger and Dark over the course of the novel.
Like any carnival, the Shadow Show deals in illusions and promises, but with a difference. Much of the best and most evocative writing of the novel occurs as the people of Green Town feel the temptations awaiting them out in the fairgrounds. For Will’s father this is especially true, a man who feels he has grown old and allowed to much of life to slip him by, and would like nothing more than to go back and revisit his youth. Which is exactly what the Shadow Show offers, a chance to go back.
But for Jim, seduced by the promises of the grown-up world whereas Will remains untouched, the temptation is to be an adult, to stop having to wait for the things he wants to experience. Something as innocent as a Merry-Go-Round becomes the instrument of these promises of youth or maturity, false promises that only curse the recipient and fuel Cooger and Dark’s huger for suffering and sorrow. Bradbury’s imagistic and unexpected prose paints a picture of a carnival gone rotten at its core, where the simple fun of the Mirror Maze can become a trap, and the freaks of the freakshow are not people born with an affliction, but those enslaved and twisted by the dark power of the carnival.
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a quick but memorable read, and really shows Bradbury’s talents for the concrete realities of small town life and the thrills and pitfalls of growing up. The scares here come out of human temptation, of the willingness of people to become what they are not and leave what they love behind to satisfy their own lingering unhappiness or unfulfilled dreams. Combine this with great atmosphere and a host of strange characters, and you have perfect October reading.
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