On a Friday night in Green Town, Illinois, the barber Mr Crosetti is locking his shop when a smell reaches him on the wind. Licorice, one boy guesses. Cotton candy, says the other. Mr Crosetti has not noticed that smell in thirty years, and a single tear runs down his cheek, because no shop in town sells the stuff and only a circus would. Then one of the boys asks him not to switch off the barber’s pole, and the old man, suddenly moved by a red stripe that winds up out of nothing and vanishes into nothing, agrees to leave it turning all night. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury has not yet shown a single monster, and it has already made its case: the carnival that is coming will sell people the past they never noticed losing.
At Three in the Morning, Something Wicked This Way Comes
The boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, are the engine of the plot, but the soul of the novel belongs to Will’s father. Charles Halloway is fifty-four, a janitor at the town library, a man who married at thirty-nine and has never stopped feeling too old for his own son. He reads alone under green lamps long after closing. He takes his one drink a night in the corner saloon. And he hears the carnival train pass at three in the morning and lies awake on the edge of his bed, thinking about why that particular hour belongs to men of his age, and Bradbury gives his insomnia a page of such bleak, exact poetry that it reads like a confession.
What makes Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury so moving is how slowly father and son find each other. For most of Part I they talk through walls and doorways. Charles burns a carnival handbill rather than discuss it; Will listens to his parents through the plaster and cannot ask. Then, in the small hours after a disastrous night, the two of them sit on the porch steps and finally talk about whether being good makes anyone happy. It ends with the older man accepting a dare to climb the secret rungs his son has hidden in the ivy, slipping, swearing, and making it to the windowsill laughing. It is a tiny scene and the warmest in the book.
That relationship gives the horror its stakes. The carnival’s partners, Cooger and the tattooed Mr Dark, deal in years: a carousel that adds them or strips them away, ridden forward or in reverse. To a boy who wants to be twenty, that is a fairground ride. To a father who fears he arrived too late for his own life, it is the most dangerous offer imaginable. Jim, whose own father is long gone and whose mother clings to him, is the more obvious mark, and the novel is honest about how badly he wants to go. Will wants nothing from the carnival except to be left alone, and in Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury that modest wish turns out to require more courage than any appetite.
A Maze That Shows You Who You Were
The novel’s sharpest scare involves no blood. The boys’ schoolteacher, Miss Foley, a cheerful woman somewhere in her fifties, steps into the carnival’s Mirror Maze on a bright Saturday morning to look for her nephew. The boys watch her multiply, wander, then panic, battering the glass. When they haul her out she is weeping for a lost girl she saw inside, and only slowly admits who the girl looked like. Bradbury never needs a fang. Reflections do the work.
He is equally good at suspense in the plain sense. A long sequence in which the boys hide beneath a pavement grille outside the cigar store, while the carnival parades the town looking for them and a toddler keeps pointing down at their hiding place, is as tense as anything in modern horror, and it hands the hero’s role to an unlikely candidate with real conviction.
Then there is the balloon. In the middle of the second night a blind witch drifts over the town in a basket beneath a green balloon, feeling the air for the boys’ heartbeats, and leaves a glistening trail like a giant snail’s across one roof so the carnival can find it by daylight. The boys scrub it off with a garden hose while a mother downstairs, half asleep, shuts a window against the rain. That collision of the uncanny and the domestic is where Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury is at its finest, and Will’s solitary answer to the witch, on the roof of an abandoned house before dawn, turns a cautious boy into a hero without changing who he is.
What Something Wicked This Way Comes Asks of Its Reader
Patience, mainly. Bradbury’s sentences are dense with metaphor, and when the action is fast that density can bury it; a passage describing a shrunken carnival worker whose eyes snap pictures like a camera runs on so long that the reader loses the scene around it. The library chapters at the centre are a bigger problem. Charles Halloway delivers several pages on fools, love, death and the nature of evil, and much of it is wise, but it arrives exactly when the pursuit should tighten. Bradbury seems to know: when the father asks how much of his talk got through, his son answers with a tiny fraction, and the joke is fair. Readers will also notice that Miss Foley’s story is set aside rather than resolved, and that the female characters, from absent mothers to a blind witch defined by her decay, serve the men’s journeys. None of this sinks Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, but it explains why some first-time readers stall around the halfway mark. The book carries child peril, grotesque death and a strain of dated language in its closing pages, all in a register of dread rather than gore.
The Boy Who Met Mr Electrico
Bradbury, born in 1920 and dead at ninety-one in 2012, often traced his whole career to a carnival. In 1932, aged twelve, he met a performer called Mr Electrico who sat in an electric chair, touched the boy with a charged sword and urged him to live forever. Bradbury said he began writing soon after and never stopped, and readers will recognise the name when it turns up in this novel. By 1962 he was famous for The Illustrated Man (1951) and The October Country (1955), and he moved to Simon & Schuster for this book, reportedly frustrated by his old publisher’s lack of enthusiasm for new ideas, according to the editor Robert Gottlieb.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury belongs to what its author called his Green Town books, a loose sequence that only closed in 2006 with Farewell Summer. Its influence has been long. Stephen King wrote about it in his study of the genre, and Neil Gaiman has named it as a formative book. It has been adapted for radio and the stage, including a BBC Radio 4 play in 2011 and a musical in 2017 that earned eleven Barrymore Award nominations.
Final Thoughts
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury is a Halloween book that keeps working in every other month, because its real subject is the wish to be any age but your own. The circus music of a calliope is the sound of temptation here, and the novel’s answer to it is stranger and gentler than readers expect. Those who want another magical show with a price attached should try Caraval by Stephanie Garber, a lighter game of illusions and sisters. Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon shares its small-town boyhood shot through with terror, and Bradbury’s own The Halloween Tree is the natural chaser for younger readers.
The barber left his pole spinning till dawn. This is a novel to leave running in the same way.