im Nightshade and Will Halloway, two boys nearing their 14th birthdays, are best friends. Born two minutes apart on the night of Halloween, they seem in many ways to be total opposites: Jim is dark and brooding, Will fair and open. Their closeness is intensified by the fact that they are next-door neighbors. The two are inseparable—at least it seems that way, until a strange carnival comes to town.
In Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show is steeped in magic from the moment of its appearance on the edge of town. Creeping out to witness its arrival, the boys see it pulling the canvas of its tents from the night clouds. By day, the carnival seems ordinary, but soon the boys' neighbors are being offered a chance to make their dearest dreams come true. And while Will and Jim can see the menace posed by the carnival, Jim is tempted by its promises of immortality and power.
The boys' inside knowledge puts them at risk almost immediately. Soon, the eerie autumn people of the carnival are hunting Jim and Will, forcing them to seek an ally. The two reluctantly enlist Will's father to help and protect them, but he is an older man, sad and alarmingly frail, who seems likely to collapse on his first attempt to shield them. Will the carnival folk simply toss the elder Halloway aside, or will Dark and Coogan offer him a renewed youth, leading the aging father to betray his own son?
A gentle symphony of fear
It is easy to see the influence of Something Wicked This Way Comes in the work of writers like Stephen King and Peter Straub. A dark fantasy set in a small town, its people are brought to life so expertly readers feel very much like citizens ... even when their adopted hometown is menaced by outside forces against which it is helpless. Bradbury's prose is musical and hypnotic, fully engaging the senses and emotions. This is a book, once opened, that truly makes the real world disappear.
Written 40 years ago, Something Wicked This Way Comes is a genuinely frightening novel. The danger Will and Jim must face is chilling and slickly believable. The story seems simple, but it has a quiet conviction. A villain like the carnival's Mr. Dark, with his mobile tattoos and calm ruthlessness, is far more chilling than flashier bad guys of both books and screen. The townspeople are mere humans, already subject to phobias and deeper terrors. In the fashion of opportunists everywhere, the carnival exploits this weakness. The fact that Dark and Coogan have magic on their side is almost beside the point: they are fantastic, but it is the current of everyday mortal dread that gives this novel its charge.
This is not to say that the book doesn't show its age at all. It takes place almost exclusively in the male sphere, and in a world whose values and context have changed vastly since 1962. But if Something Wicked This Way Comes didn't offer a little whiff of days gone by, it would be a genuine shame. This is very much a novel about the fears people have of growing older and eventually facing death, one that still has much to offer any reader pondering these same questions.
