Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes

 

BRADBURY, Ray, Something Wicked This Way Comes (2008), Gollancz / Orion Publishing Group / A Hachette Livre (UK) Co., London

Octavo; illustrated wrappers; 265pp. Mild wear to the covers; else, near fine.

 

Ah! The Classics!

I hadn’t read this for a long time; in fact it’s been ages since I picked up any Bradbury at all. I have developed a kind of hesitation about re-visiting books that I enjoyed in my youth: I tend to think that, when I first read something, I’m in a heightened state and I suck the material in like a greedy sponge; I’m so eager to consume that I miss the subtleties or overlook things that seem irrelevant at the time. Of course, if I’ve come away from the experience thinking “Man! That was the best book ever!”, I sometimes find that a second perusal years later is a bit disappointing. With this in mind, I was deliberating whether or not to pick this volume up at all.

I’ve never been a big fan of so-called “hard sci-fi”: you can keep your Asimovs and Clarkes; they’re not for me. I find them cold, and overly-technical, especially since they dwell on things that don’t – and often won’t - exist. I remember reading, at the insistence of my gaming referee of the time who told me that it would provide “insights for my character”, a book by Greg Bear: the frustration of wading through over 300 pages of highly theoretical, fictional, quantum physics, made my teeth buckle outwards. At the other extreme there’s Clifford Simak whose scientific strangeness is over-burdened by big-bosomed women striding around naked through warp fields and teleportals, because “that’s how we’ll be living in the future”. I don’t think.

Bradbury, to my mind, is the precursor to the Cyberpunk genre of Scifi. Rather than simply dissect a technological phenomenon, he shows the impact of such developments upon society and, more particularly, the human psyche. Writers such as Phillip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard do likewise. They were ‘dystopian’ before that was a cool word to use in a sentence. The human condition is a constant throughout their writings and we see possibilities and terrors through its meetings with strange and unknown forces: in this sense, their writings are more believable to us because we recognise and empathise with the reactions of the characters that they write. When Mr Simak and his ilk toss a semi-clad, ray-gun-wielding, space vixen at me wearing a glass-bubble helmet - without a trace of irony - I just roll my eyes and move on.

Bradbury’s work crosses boundaries because of this focus upon the characters and their responses; the ‘strangenesses’ he presents range a wide spectrum from totalitarian governance (Fahrenheit 451; “The Pedestrian”), to technology-run-wild (“A Sound of Thunder”) to mystical horror (The October Country). It’s because he stresses the humanity of his creations and their visceral responses, that he is able to write so convincingly about the unknown and unknowable. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a case in point.

This story revolves around the lives of two boys, coming of age in a small Midwestern town in early Autumn. Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade are best friends and neighbours, each born one minute either side of Hallowe’en in the same year. Will is bright and outgoing, while Jim is sardonic and reserved: they are, in fact, polar opposites in terms of personality but nevertheless, sworn blood brothers. Their troubles begin when a carnival enters the town unexpectedly: Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show.

The carnival is an embodiment of evil, offering visitors all desires and tempting them with dangerous deals and terrifying visions. Will and Jim see several townsfolk adversely affected by the machinations of the Shadow Show and they become targets for the insidious, tattooed, Mr Dark and his agents. Things get bad for the boys – not least because the negatively-geared Jim is seriously tempted by what the carnival has to offer – and they become increasingly isolated: no-one will believe them and the town is predisposed to welcome the carnies, who are, after all, adults. In desperation, they turn to Will’s dad, a man they have relegated to the status of old, ineffectual and emasculated of purpose.

Mr Halloway is a janitor at the local library, and often spends time there after hours, reading through the gathered wisdom of its pages. Having married late in life and feeling distanced from Will by the gulf of years between them, he compares unfavourably to Jim’s absent dad who disappeared years earlier, leaving his wife and son to fend for themselves: this level of dynamism and arrogance, though cruel, is too much for the sedate Mr Halloway to compete with in the boys’ minds. Ultimately, Will’s dad takes the boys under his wing and hides them in the library, where he has researched all things pertinent to dangerous carnivals, in an attempt to outfox the wily Mr Dark:

“[He arranged the books] in a great literary clock on a table, like someone learning to tell a new time. So he paced round and round the huge clock squinting at the yellowed pages as if they were mothwings pinned dead to the wood.

Here lay a portrait of the Prince of Darkness. Next a series of fantastic sketches of the Temptations of St. Anthony. Next some etchings from the Bizarie by Giovanbatista Bracelli, depicting a set of curious toys, humanlike robots engaged in various alchemical rites. At five minutes to twelve stood a copy of Dr Faustus, at two lay an Occult Iconography; at six under Mr Halloway’s trailed fingers now, a history of circuses, carnivals, shadow shows, puppet menageries inhabited by mountebanks, minstrels, stilt-walking sorcerers and their fantoccini. More: A Manual of the Air Kingdoms (Things That Fly Down History). At nine sharp: By Demons Possessed, lying atop Egyptian Philtres, lying atop the Torments of the Damned, which in turn crushed flat The Spell of Mirrors. Very late up the literary clock one named Locomotives and Trains, The Mystery of Sleep, Between Midnight and Dawn, The Witches’ Sabbath, and Pacts With Demons, It was all laid out. He could see the face.”

But in order to defeat the labyrinthine plotting of Messrs. Cooger and Dark, the two boys and Will’s father need to not only do their research, they must also discover their own limits and weaknesses and re-learn the trust that they each have placed in one another. (I’m not interested in posting spoilers, so I won’t tell you how it all turns out, even though I’m sure most of you know the ending already.)

What struck me this time around – particularly given my peccadilloes – was the literary references, as indicated by the above quote. I remembered from years earlier that Jim asks for a book on pterodactyls when they visit the library at the start of the book, but the rest had passed unnoticed by me at the time. It shows, I think, that Bradbury writes on several levels that can entertain young and old readers alike, without distancing either party. A truly masterful skill.

It makes me wonder what all the fuss is about the young-adult fiction blockbuster writers of today. I’ve read Rowling and Meyers and Stiefvater and none of them is a patch on Bradbury (although Rowling, albeit overblown, is better by far than the other two). Coming back to this book makes me wonder why they bothered. I guess that sometimes in our modern-day search for “the Next” and “the New”, we forget that it’s been done already.

As a kid one of my favourite books was a collection of Bradbury’s short fiction entitled Golden Apples of the Sun and many of those tales still resonate with me today, especially “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl”, which sucked me in completely and startled the hell out of me. Another favourite was The October Country, with its mind-blowing head-liner Homecoming (I always wanted an Uncle Einar in my family!). I think I’m going to have to track all these down and disappear on a Bradbury-bender for awhile...

In the meantime, this has (of course) five tentacled horrors.