Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

        Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury is a fantasy/horror novel about two thirteen-year-old best friends, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade. As the boys are preoccupied with their upcoming birthdays, a mysterious carnival arrives late in the season: Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. The boys stay after hours on the first night of the carnival to look for a travelling salesman whose bag of wares they found lying abandoned near the rides. Instead, they meet the carnival’s proprietors, Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark, also known as the Illustrated Man due to his numerous tattoos. The proprietors hand each boy a ticket for a free ride on the carousel, which they assure the boys will be in working order soon. The two men shoo the boys off but they, disbelieving that the carousel is broken, hide out of sight to see what the men do.

        What they see is incredible! Mr. Cooger rides the carousel, which is playing Chopin’s “Funeral March” in reverse, backwards, and as it spins, the years fall off him until he is a boy of thirteen again. This starts the boys out on a harrowing journey as the proprietors stalk the boys who know their secret, attempting to lure the boys with promises of making them older, an offer that appeals greatly to Jim. What the boys don’t know is that Mr. Dark’s tattoos link him to the numerous people, now the carnival’s sideshow freaks, who sold their souls to live out their fantasies at the carnival… and Mr. Dark is intent on adding the boys to his collection!

        This book was very interesting, but also very confusing to read. Stylistically, the narrative frequently resembles the stream of consciousness of the thirteen-year-old boys, and is thus riddled with run-on sentences and boggling imagery. For example:

“In front of the United Cigar Store on this before-noon Sunday with the bells of all churches ringing across here, colliding with each other there, showering sound from the sky now that the rain was spent, in front of the cigar store the Cherokee wooden Indian stood, his carved plumes pearled with water, oblivious to Catholic or Baptist bells, oblivious to the steadily approaching sun bright cymbals, the thumping pagan heart of the carnival band.”

        This kind of prose comprises the majority of the narrative, and frankly I found it confusing to read. While the prose sounds mellifluous when spoken aloud, when reading silently, it just becomes a jumble of images mashed together and loses all sense; I had to backtrack a lot in order to find the subjects and actions of sentences in order to make meaning of them. I can see why Bradbury might have chosen to write like this, as it reflects the mind states of the subjects and also creates an increased sense of wonder in an already fantastic story, but it didn’t really work for me the majority of the time. However, the times that this style of writing did work were really special:

“So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will’s along, Will breaking one window instead of none, because Jim’s watching. God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make out of the other.”

        In this instance, the use of run-on sentences and sentence fragments expresses the tirelessness of boys, youth, and friendship. The best words for Bradbury’s style of writing are “lyrical” and “evocative”—even when it doesn’t make complete sense it inspires images and feelings in the reader. That, and the themes that the novel explores, is why I still liked this book despite my problems with the prose style. Come to think of it, I’m sure that while I find the prose style to be a turn-off, others would characterize it as what makes this book so special. The book is engaging and even a little bit hypnotic and I found myself drawn in despite my initial hesitation.

        The book explores several themes, like friendship, good versus evil, sin and temptation, how everything has a time and a place, the power of laughter and smiles to dispel fear and death, nostalgia for youth, acceptance of mortality, and the necessity of pursuing life’s joys. The themes were obvious but subtle at the same time, and extremely sophisticated for what appears to be a novel aimed towards a younger demographic. Overall I would recommend reading it for the story and the themes, and decide for yourself whether Bradbury’s unique prose style works for you.