Book Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes

The book features two young boys on the cusp of their fourteenth birthday. Will Halloway longs for goodness and light, the hallowed way, as his name indicates. His best friend, Jim Nightshade is attracted to the things of darkness. Evil entices him and he answers its call. So when a strange carnival comes to town late in October, it sets his sights on Jim. Will soon finds himself in a battle to keep Jim from falling into the deadly snare of the carnival leader, Mr. Dark.

In addition to the young boys, Will’s father, Charles Halloway plays a central part. In many ways he is the pivotal character. He is the one caught in middle age, feeling the weight of his sense that most of his life is lost, that nothing is left for him. Little does he know that he’s up for the fight of his life, a fight that will either set him on a different path all together or take everything from him. And it’s through Charles that we see Bradbury voice the theme most overtly.

What is it about?

On the surface, the book deals with a clear good versus evil theme. Linked to this is an exploration of temptation and sin and the extent to which evil imprisons people. That is, of course, how Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, captures his victims. Their sins and the weight of their sadness in life – a sadness that Bradbury links with a loss of innocence – make them vulnerable to the carnival leader. When he gathers them they are transformed into horrific caricatures of their own sin.

But deeper than these, the book focuses on the fear of death. Mr. Dark stokes this fear by luring people into a magical maze of mirrors. There they see themselves in the future at their weakest.

[The reflections of Will’s father] were so old, so very old, and got much older the farther away they marched, wildly gesticulating, as Dad threw up his hands to fend off the revelation, this wild image repeated to insanity.

p. 230

This shocking sight drives many to pursue Mr. Dark’s carousel, a magical instrument of time travel. There, a person can travel either forward one year of their life for each revolution, or backwards one year at a time. Miss Foley, the boys’ teacher falls prey to the mirrors and agrees to travel backwards on the carousel. But when she’s left stranded and helpless as a very young girl, she discovers that youth wasn’t what she really wanted.

…me…me…help me…nobody’ll help me…me…I don’t like this…

p. 145

Of course, Will and Jim have no desire to recover the youth that they still possess. Rather, it’s Jim who knows too much, who peeps in windows at intimate couples, who longs to grow older and take all that he longs to experience.

But Jim, now, he knows [why bad things happen], he watches for it happening, he sees it start, he sees it finish, he licks the wound he expected, and never asks why: he knows. He always knew.

p. 17

Bradbury contrasts Jim with Will who has a natural innocence, who’s “the last peach, high on a summer tree.” (p. 16) It’s that purity that will cause Will to question evil, to not understand it. Because he stands so far apart from it, he doesn’t anticipate its impact on him and then suffers more from its blow. But not Jim. Jim knows evil. He longs for it, anticipates it even. And so he is drawn to it, and it to him.

Apart from both of these is Will’s father, Charles Halloway. As a fifty-year-old man, he represents a loss of innocence, but also a human’s natural fear of death as he draws closer to the inevitable. So it is Charles who is poised to make the choices that will either save them all or leave them prisoners of Mr. Dark.

I appreciate the name that Bradbury chose for his principle antagonist: Mr. Dark. It parallels the theme brilliantly, a theme that Charles states in this way:

I think [the carnival] uses Death as a threat. Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will….All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But… Nothing? Where do you hit it?

p.186-187

I don’t necessarily agree with Bradbury’s idea about death and implicitly, an afterlife, but Mr. Dark brilliantly encapsulates this fear that the carnival uses to prey on people.

I’ll leave it to you to read the book and discover how Charles and Will face this threat and whether or not they defeat it. But I think it’s safe to say that this is clearly a Gothic theme. It’s a very spiritual question – one that deals with the spirit of man itself and its mortality or immortality along with how we should address our own fear of death.

Gothic Tropes

The tropes themselves are many. Bradbury uses a lightning rod salesman who tries to give Jim a rod to stave off the attraction to evil that he knows is approaching in the coming storm, a man who can’t stave off his own attraction to that same evil. He uses a Gypsy Dust who “lived always tomorrow and let today slide…and so wound up penalized, having to guess other people’s wild sunrises and sunsets.” (p. 189) He uses Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, whose body is covered in the faces of those he has destroyed, a personification of Death.

And of course he uses the carnival itself, which is the arena where we expose our perspective of death. Those who are young and innocent, like Will, go to the carnival to laugh at the absurdity of things like the hall of mirrors. They don’t give it more weight than it is due. Those who have a knowledge of evil, like Jim and Charles, see in the carnival either the allure of evil or their own fear of death – that Nothing that looms ahead of us all.

Each of these, and so many other characters in the book, exemplifies Bradbury’s exploration of the fear of death and how that should and could be combated.

I loved this book. I’m shocked that I haven’t read it to date. If you haven’t picked it up, I highly recommend it. If you have, let me know what you thought of it. What did or didn’t appeal to you?

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