Ray Bradbury’s autumnal classic at 60 shows us evil at its supernatural worst — and mankind at its transcendent best.
Ray Bradbury’s autumnal classic at 60 shows us evil at its supernatural worst -- and mankind at its transcendent best.
A quaint, Midwestern town. Some kids, just old enough to begin to understand the adult world, yet young enough that they’ve not yet left the trappings of childhood completely behind. A sinister, otherworldly threat, the reality of which only children seem able to perceive, while their elders are blind to it.
Such are the makings of a certain kind of story very popular nowadays. For such a tale, steeped in nostalgia yet reinforced by horror, the creative possibilities are vast indeed. The Duffer Brothers have given us one example, via Stranger Things. Before that was the Goonies/E.T./Gremlins aesthetic of the Spielberg/Amblin 1980s, from which Stranger Things itself draws much inspiration. In literature, there were the dark imaginings of Stephen King, in works such as It.
But they all owe a debt of gratitude to Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, released 60 years ago. In Bradbury’s tale (whose title comes, appropriately, from Macbeth), the nocturnal arrival of a mysterious carnival to the fictional idyll of Green Town, Ill., disrupts and disturbs the lives of pubescent best friends Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade. What starts as a mere curiosity eventually becomes the staging ground for a contest between good and evil.
Bradbury, perhaps most famous for Fahrenheit 451, that dystopian staple of young-adult classrooms, is sometimes pigeonholed as a sci-fi/fantasy author. While it’s true that he worked in the genre — one to which Something Wicked This Way Comes also broadly belongs — thinking of him, and of this book, only in this way shortchanges both. It also underestimates the evocative power of Bradbury’s prose, employed in this work to create one of the most involved portraits of Halloweentide in all of literature. The mood begins in the prologue, which contains an unmatched description of this time of year:
And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.
The lyricism of Bradbury’s prose shows up in the ordinary, such as a description of grass covered in nighttime by a “fur of dew,” as well as the extraordinary, such as a passage marking the dark carnival’s arrival. Whereas a typical carnival emerges loudly, full of excitement, this one “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 hear the wind fizz the hair on your cheeks.”
The carnival, populated by a grotesquerie of characters against whom the boys, at first alone, contest, comes to life in vivid, unsettling descriptions. At the center of it all is Mr. Dark, “the illustration-drenched, superinfested civilization of souls.” His designs assail the boys through time-manipulating carousels, witch-piloted hot-air balloons, blood-drenched fists that drip onto boys hiding below a sewer grate, stealthy pursuits through endless stacks of books and infinite mazes of mirrors, and more. (In a 1983 adaptation, Mr. Dark is chillingly depicted by a young Jonathan Pryce.) At first, the boys alone perceive the carnival’s malevolence, as it operates through the town, preying on citizens’ desires and sins while trying to enfold the boys into its plots as a means of shutting them up. Anyone looking for an eerie and gripping Halloween read will find plenty that’s satisfying in Something Wicked This Way Comes.
He will find much more than that, though. In the friendship of Will and Jim, one finds not just the idle, eternal pleasures and foibles of evanescent boyhood, uncannily captured, but also a fitting complementarity: the innocent, cautious Will, prodded along by the knowing, intemperate Jim. Furthermore, in Will’s father, Charles, comes anxiety from the other direction: that of old age, only exacerbated by observing the son he bore late in life, and to whom he struggles to relate. These common human sentiments mix perfectly with the paranormal tableau of Bradbury’s dark imagination.
Indeed, the fears and failings of man are the fuel of Mr. Dark’s carnival. “So maybe the carnival survives, living off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets,” Charles Hollway speculates. Or perhaps, as he also muses:
The carnival doesn’t care if it gorges on fear and pain. That’s the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the screams from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way.
Set against such power, what can mere men do? In Bradbury’s tale, the answer is simple — and powerful. In the face of death, a smile, and laughter. In the throes of darkness, the love of a father for his son, or of a boy for his friend. These are the weapons that arm Will, Jim, and Charles against their deadly foes.
Such lessons may help explain the perennial power of Something Wicked This Way Comes and other, similar tales. The most unflinching and honest depictions of evil must inevitably point to the good. So even as we are unlikely to encounter these horrors, we can draw from such stories not merely the reality of more-ordinary evil in our more-ordinary lives, but also the need, and the means, to counter it. From something wicked comes something great.