Something Wicked This Way Comes

When Ray Bradbury died last month it occurred to me I haven't really read much of his work. I think I may have read Fahrenheit 451, but I'm not entirely sure. Coincidentally, one of his other famous books, Something Wicked This Way Comes, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and I have just finished reading it.

This is a novel that at times frustrated me, because it's really a book about style more than plot. Frequently I had difficulty picturing what the characters were doing, or what there motivation was. However, there was no mistaking the overall feeling of dread, which suggests Poe in its iron autumn grayness.

The story is about two boys in a small town. Will and Jim were born two minutes apart, but Will was born one minute before midnight on October 30, and Jim one minute after on Halloween. It is the last week of October, and the boys are excited about a carnival, The Pandemonium Shadow Show, that is coming to town. It arrives at 3 a.m., and the boys watch it set up.

Later they will rescue their teacher from a mirror maze, and then watch, amazed, as a man rides a carousel backwards, and ends up much younger than he started. It becomes clear that the carousel can be ridden in either direction, with one year subtracted or added per revolution.

The carnival is run by the mysterious Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, whose body pulsates with tattoos. He is described this way: "This...man was tall as a lamp post. His pale face, lunar pockmarks denting it, cast light on those who stood below. His vest was the color of fresh blood. His eyebrows, his hair, his suit were licorice black, and the sun-yellow gem which stared from the tie pin thrust in his cravat was the same unblinking shade and bright crystal of his eyes. But in this instant, swiftly, and with utter clearness, it was the suit which fascinated Will. For it seemed wove of boar-bramble, clock-spring hair, bristle, and a sort of ever-trembling, ever-glistening dark hemp. The dark suit caught light and stirred like a bed of black tweed-thorns, interminably itching, cover the man's long body with motion so it seemed he should excruciate, cry out, and tear the clothes free."

Dark is fascinated by Jim (whose last name is Nightshade), sensing he can lure him over to the side of evil by promising him a few spins on the carousel to live forever at whatever age he wants. The carnival has a menagerie of freaks, each of whom may have been imprisoned along the way, especially a dwarf who looks suspiciously like the lighting-rod salesman who came through town.

On the side of good is Will's dad, Charles, who bemoans his loss of youth. He was forty when Will was born, and looks on his son's youthfulness with envy. He is the janitor at the library, and when the boys tell him what they've seen, he chooses to believe them, and looks up some things in the stacks. It turns out that the carnival, with the same proprietor, has been around for over a hundred years.

Bradbury infuses the work with good vs. evil story lines. There is not an overt mention of religion, but Charles does attempt to defeat Dark by use of the Bible, which does not work. Instead it is love and laughter that defeats them, something of a let down, which you might think someone would have tried before now, like using water on the Wicked Witch of the West.

Bradbury is a masterful stylist, and his use of various themes resonates powerfully. Maybe I would have responded more to this book if I had read in a creaky old house the night of a thunderstorm. I really liked his discussion of the wee hours of the morning, which Ingmar Bergman would also use in his film The Hour of the Wolf:  "Three in the morning, thought Charles Holloway, seated on the edge of his bed. Why did the train come at that hour? For, he thought, it's a special hour. Women never waken then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men in middle age? They know that hour well. Oh God, midnight's not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two's not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there's hope, for dawn's just under the horizon. But three now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body's at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You're the nearest to dead you'll ever be save dying...And wasn't it true, had he read it somewhere, more people die in hospitals at 3 A.M. than at any other time...?

Oddly, the book is dedicated to Gene Kelly. Bradbury explains in the afterword that he and Kelly were friends, and had planned to do a movie together. Bradbury wrote the original version of this book as a treatment, but it was never made, so he went on to finish it as a novel. It was later made into a film in 1983, which I will be discussing here in a few days.