Something Wicked This Way Comes

The October Country

Bradbury returned repeatedly throughout his career to a particular geography: a small Midwestern town in autumn, boys on bicycles, the world about to change in ways that cannot be stopped. Something Wicked This Way Comes, published in 1962, is his most fully realised version of this world, and his most ambitious novel — not just because of its length (rare for Bradbury, who was primarily a short story writer) but because of the weight it attempts to carry.

The premise is straightforward. Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade are best friends, born minutes apart on opposite sides of midnight — Will just before, Jim just after, which Bradbury presents as a meaningful difference in their temperaments. A carnival arrives in their town in the wrong season, late at night, travelling without announcement. Its proprietors, Cooger and Dark, offer rides and attractions that appear to grant desires: a carousel that ages or rejuvenates its riders. A mirror maze. A hall of curiosities staffed by the people the carnival has collected along the way.

The Symbol

The carnival at the centre of Something Wicked is Bradbury’s most powerful single invention. It is an image of temptation rendered with genuine imaginative force: the carnival offers you exactly what you most want, which is the nature of its malevolence. The older woman who wants to be young again. The man who wants power. The boy who wants to be old enough. The mechanism by which these desires are punished is precise and elegant — the carousel can spin you backward or forward in time, but the time it gives or takes is not the time you actually wanted.

This is an old theological idea — be careful what you wish for — given body and atmosphere and October air. What makes Bradbury’s treatment exceptional is that he does not moralize. He is not telling you that desire is sinful. He is telling you something subtler: that the desires Mr. Dark exploits are the desires that have become unmoored from their proper contexts, the wanting that has curdled into a wish to escape one’s own life rather than live it more fully.

Charles Halloway

The character who gives Something Wicked its emotional depth is not either of the boys but Will’s father: Charles Halloway, the town librarian, a man in his fifties who married late and has quietly spent years mourning the life he did not have. He is, at the novel’s opening, exactly the kind of person the carnival was designed for — regretful, hesitant, a man who has learned to watch life from a careful distance.

The book’s resolution depends on Charles Halloway discovering that this is not, in fact, who he needs to be — that the antidote to the carnival’s particular magic is not youth or power or any of the things it offers, but something simpler and harder: genuine delight in the life available. Bradbury makes him earn this, and the scene in which he confronts Mr. Dark is one of the finest in the novel — a middle-aged librarian, laughing, refusing to be afraid, armed with nothing but the knowledge that mortality is not the worst thing that can happen to a person.

The Prose

Bradbury is doing something unusual in Something Wicked: he is sustaining the lyrical intensity of his short fiction across a novel-length work. This is harder than it sounds. The very qualities that make Bradbury’s sentences extraordinary — their density, their musicality, their tendency to pause and circle a feeling rather than moving directly through it — can become exhausting at novel length. Something Wicked mostly avoids this trap, though the middle section requires a certain surrender to atmosphere over incident.

What the prose achieves, when it’s working at full power, is a precise recreation of the emotional texture of being young in October — the specific way that autumn evening light and the smell of dead leaves and the knowledge that school has started again combine into something that is not quite happiness and not quite dread and that adults, Bradbury suggests, spend the rest of their lives trying to remember accurately.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Bradbury’s most ambitious novel, and one of the most atmospheric books in American literature. Best read in October, obviously.