Something Wicked This Way Comes

New rating: 4.5 stars, rounded up.

So poetic. Especially for a novel about a creepy carnival run by an Illustrated Man. No one writes quite like Bradbury.
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That was the entirety of my review when I first read this little book in 2015. And you know what? I think that might be enough.

Or, it should be. But you know me. I always have opinions to share.

I have this deep but slightly conflicted love for Ray Bradbury. It started when I was in high school, when I first read Fahrenheit 451 and one of his short stories, “A Sound of Thunder,” nearly back to back. I was entranced by both stories, but something about the actual writing itself stumped me. While I really enjoyed the cadence of it, and found it often beautiful, there were some stylistic choices and outdated colloquialisms that threw me. I think this is a common complaint when reading backlist books, particular those written more than 40 years ago. And, judging from personal reading experience, the issue of outdated slang tends to be more of a complaint with less formal works, such as Bradbury’s stories. But while digging through the prose can be a bit of a struggle, it’s one that is not only immensely rewarding, but one that becomes easier the more often you do it.

That’s the case for me with this book in particular. I appreciated it when I first read it. However, revisiting it was a radically different experience. Because I knew where the story was going this time, I didn’t feel the need to sift through the prose; I could just enjoy it for what it was. Which made the story even more enjoyable, and powerful, than it was for me the first time I read it.

On the surface, this is the story of Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, next-door neighbors and best friends, who were born two minutes apart. This is the story of the October they were thirteen, when an ominous carnival came to town. This is the story of the carnival threatening to tear them apart as it offered to fulfill dark dreams, and how they fought to stay together. But that’s not what this story is to me. No, for me, this is the story of Charles Halloway, Will’s father. This is the story of experiences deferred and how the fear of losing your life can keep you from ever truly living it. It’s the story of facing your demons in the mirror and finding reasons to laugh and keep on living anyway. It’s the story of accepting yourself, faults and all, and enjoying the life you have instead of wasting it trying to recapture what you’ve lost. If there’s a hero to this story, it is definitely Charles Halloway.

Bradbury broached some incredibly deep topics here, but in ways that never, in my opinion, detracted in any way from the plot. The many forms temptation takes, and how it dresses itself up differently to appeal to each person, was one of my favorite themes. Others included how good triumphs over evil not by might, but by purity of heart; how difficult transitional ages can be, whether from boy to man or middle-aged to elder; the power of belief and joy in the face of darkness; and the importance of connection, regardless of age. There’s so much food for thought in this little book.

Aside from the outdated colloquialisms that I mentioned above, and how certain writing choices threw me out of the plot on occasion, I really only have one complaint about this book: the pacing. There were certain scenes that felt rushed, while others would have been a good deal stronger if shortened by a few pages. But the atmosphere here was second-to-none, and I don’t know that I can think of any other book that so perfectly encapsulates an entire season to me. Something Wicked This Way Comes is nostalgia in book form, autumn contained in less than 300 pages.

Another reason I love Something Wicked This Way Comes is because I can so clearly see how it, and the rest of Bradbury’s catalogue, influenced other authors I love. As I was reading, I found shades of King and Koontz and Gaiman, and I loved reading something that I know they, not only read, but were changed by in some way. Some of the most powerful, important books in my life are the ones I know help inspired other stories I adore.

There’s something so special about Bradbury’s work in general, and this book in particular. The way a 60 year-old book can make me feel nostalgic for a time I’ve never personally known is more than a little magical. And there’s just something about a creepy carnival that captures the imagination. If you’ve never read Something Wicked This Way Comes, I highly recommend it. In my opinion, it’s the perfect October read. And if you’ve read it in the past but it’s been a while, I encourage you to revisit it; I’m very glad that I did.

Well, this one was an all-out treat for me. First, the prose caught this reader completely by surprise. A rambunctious attention to making every image vivid and every emotion heightened lends to the story a sense of both dreamlike play and menacing immediacy. And while Bradbury writes with an expressionistic style, he never once loses his sense for storytelling, even when his over-reliance on turning nouns into adjectives can cause for some clunkers. But overall the spell Bradbury weaves is intoxicating. How can a reader resist a sinister carnival that feeds off of the foibles of humanity? Or its demonic proprietor, Mr. Dark, an illustrated man whose tattoos are a seething mass of monsters? Or his menacing dust witch that hunts for children in the night with a hot hair balloon that oozes silver slime? Or a treacherous carousel that promises children a means to skip ahead to adulthood, and that seduces adults with dreams of youth reclaimed, but instead only warps its riders into horrific configurations? But as delicious as the story's fantastical representation of evil is, Bradbury really shines with his protagonists, both young and old, and their many nuanced meditations on friendship, the impatience of youth, the regrets of aging, and the manifold disappointments of living a life based on decency. A tale of wonder and terror for readers of all ages, I proclaim!

My second Bradbury of the year, I enjoyed this even more than Fahrenheit 451.

A coming of age tale with friends Jim and Will both approaching their 14th birthdays, a small town where a sinister traveling show is about to reek havoc all set in October.
It’s like all my favourite stories combined!

Originally published in 1962. I get the sense that this made such a massive impact on some of my favourite authors, that it influenced their work aswell.

There’s just so many creepy concepts, like the approaching thunderstorm and the eerie carousel that Bradbury vividly brings to life.
The writing style can be slightly over complicated at times, but the short chapters soon compensated for that.

Bradbury’s concepts are just so enchanting, I’m definitely planning on a returning to Green Town soon!

4.5 stars! I really think this book is very good. It is written in prose and is very creepy. Its been a good Halloween read. I'm a little late but still good for the season.

By the pricking of my thumbs ………

2 stars = Meh. Intriguing enough to finish, but not enough to like it.

Why, most men jump at the chance to give up everything for nothing. There's nothing we're so slapstick with as our own immortal souls.

Perhaps if I had read this one when I was a middle school aged child, I too would have felt the magic that most reviewers enjoyed. If I had a time machine, I would make sure to have read this beloved classic back then. But now I am a middle aged adult, too cynical to enjoy the farcical plot - not just the fantasy elements, but also little details like 13 year old boys recognizing Chopin’s “Funeral March”. I could not buy into any of it.

They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale.

Written two years after “To Kill a Mockingbird”, the father felt like a ripoff of Atticus Finch. He was unrealistically good to the point he felt like a caricature. The dialogue overall was too sweet and sappy, too golly-jinkers for my tastes. And there is not enough caffeine in the world for me to enjoy over 300 pages with loud, exuberant children. Child narrators are not my favorite as a rule, but there are plenty of exceptions. Here, even on the page, these boys were too tumultuous and excited for my sensitive ears. They drained my energy, a scarce resource to begin with.

God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.

I am glad I finally read this so I can relate to its cultural inclusions, but it was a disappointment for me. I was looking for a mildly creepy book, but this felt more Disney-esque than scary to me. I bet I would have loved it when I was a kid though, and plenty of other adults love and cherish it still, so don’t let my review deter you.

We salt our lives with other people’s sins.
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First Sentence: First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.

Favorite Quote: Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, and end, a darkness. Nothing.

This is the book I fell in love with, the book that made me want to write. If I could stir the heart of a reader the way that Bradbury did, that's everything. I'll always be so grateful... and a little in awe.

Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes was quite a surprise, beginning as a sort of modified Hardy Boys or a Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer tale and then being gradually uplifted to the level of a fascinating morality tale involving good vs. evil, present vs. past, youthful innocence vs. the fear of aging/death and most of all, a kind of exalted memory of childhood experiences and their importance in our lives.



Bradbury was known for his science-fiction works but he chose to think of this part of his literary contribution as an attempt to bring poetry to the world of science and even as magical-realism but with the emphasis on realty rather than on magic.

It was said that Ray Bradbury's children cross boundaries that separate reality from fantasy, with adults & children representing different races. At one point in Something Wicked This Way Comes there is a comment: "Who'd believe an old man was ever a boy?" However, in reading Bradbury's Halloween-themed novel, it seems clear that the author never ceased being a boy.

The main characters in Something Wicked This Way Comes are Jim Nightshade, who is 13 years, 11 months & 23 days old, while his best friend William Holloway is all of 13 years, 11 months & 24 days. The two boys enjoy a special bond with each other and a shared curiosity about many things, with the story launched when a carnival comes to town rather late in the season and just a week prior to Halloween.

Strange things begin to happen, with a seller of lightning rods being turned into a dwarf, town-folks disappearing, the boy's 7th grade teacher being cast backward in age following a ride on a carousel in reverse, carnival freaks aplenty, all delivered by a ghostly train arriving at 3 AM and the threat of additional malice at every turn, especially on the carnival grounds.

At one point, the two boys seek sanctuary not in a church but in the village library where Will Holloway's father works in a menial job but where there is an obvious reverence for each & every book within, something that the most malevolent character, "Mr. Dark" sees as a threat.



One gauges how important books were to Bradbury as a young boy in Waukegan, Illinois, later recast at Green Town and also remembers the critical place of the power of ideas through books in the author's Fahrenheit 451, his best selling novel.

Here is just a sample of Bradbury's prose with Will's father imparting his explanation of the meaning of life to his son:

First things first. Let's bone up on history. If men had wanted to stay bad forever, they could have, agreed? Agreed. Did we stay out in the fields with the beasts? No. In the water with the barracuda? No. Somewhere we let go of the gorilla's paw. Somewhere we turned in our carnivore's teeth & started chewing blades of grass. We been working mulch as much as blood into our philosophy for quite a few lifetimes.

Since then, we measure ourselves up the scale from apes but not half as high as angels. It was a nice new idea & we were afraid we'd lose it, so we put it on paper & built buildings like this one around it. And we been going in & out of these buildings chewing it over, that one sweet blade of grass, trying to figure out how it all started, when we made the move, when we decided to be different.

I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by the night fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, & thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day & the children who must follow her.

And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them. He felt that seed like slime in his pulse, splitting, making more against the day they would multiply his body into darkness.

So that man, the first one, knew what we know now: our hour is short, eternity is long. With this knowledge came pity & mercy, so we spared others for the later, more intricate, more mysterious benefits of love.

Ultimately, good prevails in Something Wicked This Way Comes because in the words of Charles Holloway, Will's father: "Sometimes good has weapons and evil has none." And also, "Evil has only the power we give it."



Oddly enough for an author who often seemed to chart future worlds, Ray Bradbury never learned to drive, a particular limitation since he lived his adult life in Los Angeles and disdained air travel, preferring to travel by train & ship.

When asked to predict the future, Bradbury commented that he had no wish to predict the future and would rather prefer to avoid it. Some of the author's prose can seem a bit long-winded at times but his writing is also very lyrical. Something Wicked This Way Comes is on the surface a rather dark fable but one that represents a splendidly magical story well told.



And as a footnote on Bradbury, he bequeathed his own library to the Waukegan, Illinois library that Andrew Carnegie endowed to the author's town, the place where Bradbury spent countless hours as a youngster & where his world was so greatly expanded.

*Within my review: 2 images of Ray Bradbury; poster for the film version of Something Wicked This Way Comes; the Carnegie Library in Waukegan, Illinois where Bradbury came of age as a reader & a creative literary force.