by Ray Bradbury
DETAILS:
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: October 24, 2017 (this particular edition, anyway. 1962 originally)
Format: Paperback
Length: 335 pg.
Read Date: September 27-30, 2025
“Now, look, since when did you think being good meant being happy?”
“Since always.”
“Since now learn otherwise, Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty And men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites. Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn’t just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that’s your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I’ve known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. I suppose it’s thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can’t let himself alone, won’t lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.”
What’s Something Wicked This Way Comes About?
I have to say, I felt kind of embarrassed when this book was suggested to me for a book featuring a circus or carnival for a book challenge. I knew Bradbury had written something with the title, but that’s all I knew.
Now, faced with trying to describe it, I’m not sure how to describe it without making it sound underwhelming. So let’s just appropriate a little of the back of the book (especially because most of you will know what the book is about already):
For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Two boys will discover the secret of its smoke, mazes, and mirrors; two friends who will soon know all too well the heavy cost of wishes…and the stuff of nightmares.
Bradbury’s Prose
Just wow. I can’t tell you how many times I had to stop to re-read a line or paragraph. I loved the descriptions, the scenes—the talk about the ache inside a person.
It’s lyrical, it’s poetic, it’s gorgeous–and I don’t know what else to say.
I’ll admit I was underwhelmed by the novel (see below), but the way he wrote it? Boy howdy…it was so wonderful.
So, what did I think about Something Wicked This Way Comes?
“Can they…” said Jim. “I mean… do they… buy souls?”
“Buy, when they can get them free?” said Mr. Halloway. “Why, most men jump at the chance to give up everything for nothing. There’s nothing we’re so slapstick with as our own immortal souls. Besides, you’re inferring that’s the Devil out there. I only say it’s a type of creature has learned to live off souls, not the souls themselves. That always worried me in the old myths. I asked myself, why would Mephistopheles want a soul? What does he do with it when he gets it, of what use is it? Stand back while I throw my own theory over the plate. Those creatures want the flaming gas off souls who can‘ sleep nights, that fever by day from old crimes. A dead soul is no kindling. But a live and raving soul, crisped with self-damnation, oh that’s a pretty snoutful for such as them.”
I’m not sure the characters ever reached three-dimensional—but Bradbury made a good stab at it, but those stabls felt sporadic. That said, for characters that I thought needed some filling out, I really liked them.
Mr. Halloway, the father of one of the two boys, was the only one to take them seriously. He’s the best thing about this book. His humility, his determination, his actually being able to say something to his son about his life and affection for him. He is not a brave or courageous man. But when it comes down to it—he acts like one. He seems to be a broken man early on, but there was something about him I liked as well as pitied—by the end, I admired him. It’d have been easy for Bradbury to turn him into a father who wasn’t really in the story (like both boys’ mothers)—and that’s the way stories like this usually go. But to turn him into someone who works with them? That’s a rarity.
This was creepy, for sure. I liked the take on humanity—both the good and the bad. I thought the story wasn’t bad, even if it felt over-familiar. I thought the prose was deliciously rich, and just wish the characters lived up to it. It’s not my genre, it didn’t all click with me, but it was good enough, and I’m glad I read it.
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