Maybe You Should Read This: Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes
On Bradbury's style, characters and his endings.
For a long time after we studied it in school, Fahrenheit 451 was my favourite book. It’s been too long now since I’ve read it to remember why I enjoyed it so much, but reading Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) this past week reminds me how good a writer Ray Bradbury was.
Alongside Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked is one of his few full-length novels in a repertoire of mostly short stories, and it centres on the experience of two boys when a travelling carnival comes to town. Here’s three things I loved about this book.
1. Style
The most striking thing about Something Wicked is the way Bradbury writes. His style draws you in from the moment you start reading; it’s gripping, and beautiful. Take this excerpt describing two boys watching faraway railway tracks blink red and yellow signals in the night.
“From these gaunt windows they could rifle-fire their gaze artillery distances past library, city hall, depot, cow barns, farmlands to empty prairie!
There, on the world's rim, the lovely snail-gleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherry-coloured semaphore to the stars.”
Isn’t it gorgeous? The ‘rifle-fire’ of their gazes, the ‘snail-gleam’ of the railway tracks in moonlight. Railway signal lights not just blinking but ‘flinging wild gesticulations’. Bradbury’s language is just so full of life, and he never seems to rely on a dead metaphor when he can invent his own.
Contemporary authors seem to favour writing in an ‘invisible’ style, tying their writing to real life as their readers might understand it. Bradbury never makes such a claim. His narrator is unapologetically present, so much so that reading it feels like a bedtime story recounted by a wise old grandparent with a twinkle in their eye. And while the story takes place in a dreamlike Midwest landscape, it never fills in more detail than necessary to paint an impressionistic setting, remaining vague enough to hold the extraordinary plot he spins within it.
And while his writing is delightfully prosaic (a far cry from the tense violin-screech jumpscares of modern horror movies), Something Wicked undoubtedly belongs in the same genre. Bradbury is adept at letting the reader feel just as hopeless and hunted as his characters.
2. Characters
Another feature of Bradbury’s storytelling is characters that are as compelling as they are unselfconscious. The main characters, Will Hathaway and Jim Nightshade, never broach the quirky, ‘well that just happened!’ self-awareness so many authors find it necessary to burden their protagonists with.
They are boys and they delight in their youth, in climbing out of their windows at night and running all about town. Intentionally written as opposites, each acts as a foil for the other, as well as with the third protagonist, Will’s father.
This too is a departure from the quintessential horror story. The horror writer recognises that parents offer a safety anithetical to the terrors child protagonists must face, and removes them accordingly. In those stories, parents are often distant figures moving in the background, a type of set dressing that sometimes grounds the main characters for a plot-useful period of time.
But in including Charles Hathaway in the story, Bradbury hones the horror to a knife’s edge – a villain that doesn’t shrink away from grown-ups, but hurts and terrorises them just as ferociously.
Bradbury reveals Will’s father to us as though he is coming into focus, deliberately peeling away Will’s childish perspective to show a man trying to come to terms with who he is and the choices he’s made.
And it’s only in that struggle, and the relationship between father and son, that Bradbury can deliver this story. Maybe my favourite passage in Something Wicked is the conversation between Will and his father, at one in the morning.
“But I was so busy wrestling myself two falls out of three, I figured I couldn't marry until I had licked myself good and forever. Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.”
The entire passage, which is too long to attach here, captures the essence of Bradbury’s writing: it brings these big, abstract, universal concepts down to earth, to something you can see and touch and know. Charles Hathaway explains to his son that being good doesn’t mean you get to be happy, and you can taste the temptation of the lemon cake in the icebox on hot nights.
It’s in these conversations that the characters become more than an audience-surrogate for the horrors they experience, and instead touch this raw thread of humanity connecting them to the reader.
Am I a good person? Can that save me? Will asks his father. It helps, Charles replies. And it does, in the end.
3. The Ending
One of the things I do remember loving about Fahrenheit 451 is the ending; Montag’s choice to change his life and dedicate it to the archival of stories instead. It was hopeful and somber by turns, warning that our choices have consequences, but we are always free to make different ones. I find this rings true for the ending of Something Wicked as well.
At the centre of this story is a carousel that can change your age. Throughout the book, the villains use it to inflict violence on unwilling victims, a device to threaten and tempt the protagonists by turns. Both Jim and Charles are drawn to it: one a child, wanting to be older; the other a man, wanting to be younger.
And at the end, all villains defeated, all friends safe, Bradbury dodges the easy ending. Here, the protagonists find themselves in control of the carousel, and the seduction of its power becomes clear.
“The great machine softly tilted in the tides of night.
Just three times around, ahead, thought Will. Hey.
Just four times around, ahead, thought Jim. Boy.
Just ten times around, back, thought Charles Halloway.
Lord.
Each read the thoughts in the other's eyes.
How easy, thought Will.
Just this once, thought Jim.
But then, thought Charles Halloway, once you start, you'd always come back. One more ride and one more ride.”
This denouement, expertly crafted, contextualises the great horror they’ve defeated. It’s in this quiet, still moment that Bradbury strikes at the heart of the book: it’s our choices that make us who we are. And just as the villains must have made their choice, so do our heroes.
And so…
Something Wicked This Way Comes was a pleasure to read, and demonstrates Bradbury’s mastery of voice, character and plot, threaded through with thoughtful language and imagery. But on top of that, there’s a rare joy in the novel. The book reads like Bradbury loved writing it, which in my opinion makes it well worth reading for that experience alone.
The original gimmick for this piece was meant to be ‘In a Hundred Words…” but this ended up being like 800 words :| I know this was too long but the next one will not be as long… I prommy…
Anyway I Love this book and wld 100% recommend, it’s a bit wordy but leans more towards adventure than horror overall, so it’s not too scary.
Also I lied. Here is a longer excerpt from that passage. What does this man eat to write like this.
“For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two[…]
Oh, it would be lovely if you could just be fine, act fine, not think of it all the time. But it's hard, right? With the last piece of lemon cake waiting in the icebox, middle of the night, not yours, but you be awake in a hot sweat for it, eh? Do I need tell you? Or, a hot spring day, noon, and there you are chained to your school desk and away off there goes the river, cool and fresh over the rock-fall. Boys can hear clear water like that miles away. So, minute by minute, hour by hour, a lifetime, it never ends, never stops, you got the choice this second, now this next, and the next after that, be good, be bad, that's what the dock ticks, that's what it says in the ticks. Run swim, or stay hot, run eat or lie hungry. So you stay but once stayed, Will, you know the secret, don't you? don't think of the river again. Or the cake. Because if you do, you'll go crazy. Add up all the rivers never swum in, cakes never eaten, and by the time you get my age, Will, it's[…]”