Front Cover

Two boys. Born in nearly the same instant. One born a minute before midnight; one born a minute after midnight on October 31st. Born in the same town, in the same year. And yet, by the end of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, one boy will have traveled years ahead of the other…

Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway are the two boys in Green Town, Illinois, who walk, play, and run in that nebulous time between summer and winter. And when summer is not quite gone, but winter is in sight, they hear the carnival. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. The show comes late at night, late in the season for carnivals, late on the edge of winter, but the boys can feel it pulling them toward it.

I read Something Wicked years ago, remembered liking it, and was excited to pick up again recently. The story is just as creepy and intense as I remembered, but I also found something more to the writing and Bradbury’s storytelling that I missed the first time through.

At the surface, Something Wicked appears to be a simple Halloween story. After all, the title comes from the witches’ opening lines in Macbeth. The boys are drifting through the end of autumn, waiting for Halloween. The carnival brings its haunted house of mirrors.

Under this dark surface, though, Something Wicked isn’t a children’s book. It might not even be a book for young adults, though I originally read it in just out of my teens. Bradbury manages to balance themes from both a coming-of-age story and an end-of-life search for meaning, but this is a coming of age story in the way that is a diatribe against book-burning. Bradbury gives it an older, more reminiscing tone than most coming-of-age stories allow. In the process, he plays with even darker themes of mortality and fear. Bradbury also plays with words in a dazzling fashion. It’s worth reading a couple times. Only, beware—read it at your risk. You just might get trapped along with the boys.