Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
"Something Wicked This Way Comes" is a novel by Ray Bradbury that explores the classic conflict of good versus evil within a small Midwestern town, Green Town, Illinois, during an unusual autumn. The story begins with the arrival of the sinister Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, which entices the local children with promises of youthful experiences and forbidden joys. The protagonists, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, represent contrasting aspects of boyhood—innocence and curiosity—each facing the temptations and dangers posed by the carnival. As they navigate their fears and the allure of adulthood, the narrative delves into themes of time, aging, and the human struggle against malevolent forces.
Central to the plot is Will's father, Charles Halloway, who, despite his middle age and insecurities, ultimately embodies wisdom and compassion, using these qualities to confront the carnival's dark influence. The novel presents a rich tapestry of characters, including the tragic figure of Miss Foley, who becomes ensnared by the carnival's promises of restored youth. Bradbury's lyrical prose and metaphorical style create a haunting atmosphere, underscoring the tension between innocence and the inevitable journey toward maturity. While reception of the novel has been mixed, it stands as a significant work within Bradbury’s oeuvre, offering insights into childhood, the grotesque, and the profound impact of literature and imagination.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
First published: 1962
Type of plot: Fantasy
Time of work: The early 1930’s
Locale: Green Town, Illinois
Principal Characters:
Will Halloway , an open, innocent young boy nearing the age of fourteenJim Nightshade , his best friend, a dark enigmatic boy, also approaching fourteenCharles Halloway , Will’s father, a middle-aged janitor in the town libraryJ. C. Cooger , andG. M. Dark , the owners of a traveling carnival and buyers of human soulsMiss Foley , a schoolteacher who desperately wants to recapture her youth
The Novel
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a story of good versus evil, with love and laughter overcoming fear and illusion, somewhat in the manner of a medieval morality play. Yet Bradbury puts life into this ancient literary tradition to produce an entertaining and interesting work that falls just short of being a fantasy masterpiece. The setting is Green Town, Illinois, an idyllic Midwestern small town which is also the locale of his partly autobiographical Dandelion Wine (1957).
The prologue contains the enigmatic sentence, “One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight.” The subject of time and its distortion by evil forces becomes a crucial element in the novel. The sentence refers to the arrival of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show in Green Town. The show is heralded by Tom Fury, a mysterious lightning-rod peddler, who appears to the protagonists Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade and sells Jim a lightning rod in anticipation of an approaching storm. It is significant that Fury sells the rod to Jim, a dark-haired, intent boy born one minute after midnight on October 31, in contrast with his best friend and next-door neighbor, Will, a blond, good-natured boy born one minute before midnight on October 30. While Will participates joyously in uncomplicated, boyish activities, Jim has a desire for strange, often forbidden experiences, a desire which attracts him to the Cooger and Dark carnival and nearly causes his damnation.
The traveling show creates no suspicions in the minds of Green Town’s adults, but the active imaginations of Will and Jim are immediately aroused when a carnival, something usually associated with summer, appears so late in the year, in a train of outdated design and with a calliope playing bizarrely altered church music. An atmosphere of menace seems to hang over the apparently festive carnival. Miss Foley, the boys’ seventh-grade teacher, becomes lost in the Mirror Maze, which tantalizes her with reflections of herself in youth. Later, the two friends see Mr. Cooger enter the carousel and, as the carousel turns backward, become younger and younger until he is an eight-year-old boy, whereupon he masquerades as Miss Foley’s nephew Robert. Will fears that Miss Foley is in danger, but Jim sees in the magic carousel a way of rapidly entering the adult world. When Cooger enters the ride a second time to age forward, Will jams the controls and Cooger is transformed into a wizened old man. This draws the wrath of the show down on the two boys, who must flee both from the carnival people and from the police, becoming isolated within their own town.
The boys turn to Will’s father, Charles Halloway, a middle-aged man who married late in life. Mr. Halloway learns that the Cooger and Dark show has traveled around the country for at least eighty years, always arriving someplace in October. It is apparently an immortal band of freaks who live off of the sufferings of others, whom they tempt with forbidden enjoyments, using people’s own desires to destroy them. Mr. Halloway discovers that love and laughter are the only defense against the carnival, and he uses these weapons to destroy it before Jim can be artificially aged into a replacement for Mr. Cooger. The novel ends with the ordered world still intact and both Will and Jim aged, not through perverted magic, but through the natural maturing process.
The Characters
As is appropriate, given Bradbury’s intentions, the protagonists, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, are essentially allegorical figures rather than realistic, fully developed characters. In the novel, they function as Bradbury’s picture of boyhood split in two, portraying the dual nature of boys, innocence and mischief, nostalgia and the passionate desire to gain the status of an adult. The story’s events take place just before their fourteenth year, so they are in a time between carefree childhood and adolescence, which brings the beginnings of responsibility. The carnival is their first direct contact with the malevolent yet attractive outer world. Will, content to remain a child, is repulsed by the Shadow Show. His danger is that he will be paralyzed by fear, as at one point he is paralyzed by a fortune-teller’s magic, yet Will does acquire the courage to strike back at the freaks in order to save Jim, indicating that he is growing up. By contrast, Jim is eager to enter the adult world by any means and nearly joins the carnival to accomplish this. Jim’s interest in life’s dark side is not in itself evil, but it could easily lead to perversity. By the novel’s end, his restless spirit has been chastened by his contact with Cooger and Dark, and he is ready to develop at a natural pace.
Cooger and Dark, the carnival’s proprietors, are living embodiments of evil. Dark, with his tattoo-covered body, is obviously taken from Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man (1951), while Cooger and his carousel transformations had previously appeared in “The Dark Ferris” (1948). They and their followers are the “autumn people,” according to Mr. Halloway, those who fear the approach of winter and death so much that they enter an immortal half-existence and stay outside the cycle of life. To maintain this state, they must periodically feed on human souls, their victims eventually becoming members of the carnival. They prey upon human fears and vanities, especially those connected with time, such as the fear of growing old or the desire to grow up rapidly, so that their victims come willingly. Halloway suggests that everyone is at times an autumn person, and this revelation is the center of the carnival’s horror.
Charles Halloway is the most fully realized figure in the book and one of Bradbury’s most interesting characters. Halloway, a middle-aged janitor, hardly seems to be a heroic figure, yet it is he who ultimately defeats the carnival. For years a rootless wanderer with intellectual yearnings, he settled down and had a son fairly late in life. His age weighs heavily on him: He envies the boys’ vitality and believes that he is too old to be a proper father for Will. If anyone would be vulnerable to the carnival’s seductions, so it seems, it would be Halloway, but in fact his painfully acquired self-knowledge and his strong love for his family allow him to see through Cooger and Dark’s show. Like Will and Jim, Halloway is in an in-between time, with vigorous adulthood on one side and old age on the other. He uses wisdom and compassion, the weapons of age, against the carnival, yet he also discovers that he possesses a vitality which he thought he had lost. Halloway is a hero, but he is a human, fallible one, who feels temptation and can overcome it. Hence, he is a more engaging hero for his fallibility.
Miss Foley, an example of the pathetic victims of the freaks, is “a little woman lost somewhere in her gray fifties.” She is a friendly, affectionate woman, but, being a spinster, she has no close familial ties. Even her nephew Robert is, in reality, the transformed Mr. Cooger. Fearing the onset of old age and death, she welcomes the carnival’s offer of restored youth, even going so far as to betray Will and Jim to the police and to Mr. Dark to prevent them from interfering. When her wish is granted, she finds that as an adult woman in a little girl’s body she is isolated from natural life, as she had already isolated herself morally. The only place for her is with the physically and spiritually deformed inhabitants of the Cooger and Dark show.
Critical Context
Aside from Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Something Wicked This Way Comes (which appeared in a film version in 1983) is Bradbury’s only full-length novel of the fantastic. Critical reaction has been mixed on the work. While the premise of the story is compelling, some critics have suggested that Bradbury’s highly metaphorical, lyric prose style, often one of his greatest strengths, slows the pace of narrative; at times, the imagery seems to overcome the novel entirely.
The novel does present many of Bradbury’s favorite subjects in one work. An interest in children and their special insights, a nostalgic portrayal of the Midwestern small town, a fascination for the grotesque and its attractions, and a conviction of the value of literature, especially fantastic literature—all play a large part in Bradbury’s work. There are also several specific links to Bradbury’s other writings in this novel. As previously noted, Mr. Cooger, the Illustrated Man, and Green Town had appeared in earlier stories. In addition, the Pandemonium Shadow Show might have been suggested by the short-story collection Dark Carnival (1947), and the autumn people are first mentioned in The October Country (1955). This wealth of cross-references and recurring themes makes the novel a good introduction to Bradbury’s fictional world as well as entertaining reading in its own right.
Bibliography
Greenberg, Martin Harry, and Joseph D. Olander. Ray Bradbury. New York: Taplinger, 1980. An insightful collection of critical essays that addresses various aspects of Bradbury’s writing, including his use of the frontier myth. Features a helpful index and bibliography.
Mogen, David. Ray Bradbury. Boston: Twayne, 1986. An excellent collection of critical essays on Bradbury’s novels, including Something Wicked This Way Comes. Includes a selected bibliography and index.
Nolan, William. The Ray Bradbury Companion. Detroit: Gale Research, 1975. A classic reference that includes critical essays, a brief biography, a comprehensive bibliography, and facsimiles of Bradbury’s unpublished and uncollected works on all media. Features an introduction by Bradbury.
Touponce, William F. Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Reader. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Press, 1984. Written from a reader-response critical perspective, Touponce’s study offers keen insight into Bradbury’s works. Includes a bibliography and index.