Treat or Trick? The Trap of Our Desires
Reviewing Ray Bradbury’s Halloween Classic, ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’
One of St. Augustine’s great insights is that people orient their lives toward who and what they love, but if our loves are misplaced or misdirected they can maim and distort us. “One who seeks what he cannot obtain suffers torture, and one who has got what is not desirable is cheated, and one who does not seek for what is worth seeking for is diseased,” said the African bishop in one of his many explorations of the idea.
Theologians, philosophers, psychologists, and others have leveraged Augustine’s insight for their various projects. Novelist Ray Bradbury used it for a now-classic Halloween novel about a traveling carnival that preys on people’s hopes and imprisons them in their fears.
The Circus Comes to Town
Something Wicked This Way Comes begins with two boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, nextdoor neighbors since their birth almost fourteen years before—Will born a minute before midnight, October 30, and Jim two minutes later on October 31.
One Friday, a week before their birthdays, a traveling salesman named Tom Fury wanders through town and offers the boys a special lightning rod, one that will “sass back any storm.” Jim’s house is sure to be struck by lightning, he says. The boys, thrilling at the prospect, accept the rod, clamber atop Jim’s roof, and install it.
But Jim is conflicted. Later that night, before the storm rolls in, he rethinks it: Getting struck by lightning might, after all, be the most exciting thing imaginable.
Why, he thought, why don’t I climb up, knock that lightning rod loose, throw it away?
And then see what happens?
Yes.
And then see what happens!
And what does happen?
The storm arrives as predicted, but first the carnival comes chugging into town at 3 a.m., Saturday morning, on its own train—an antique engine pulling “black plumed cars, licorice-colored cages, and a sooty calliope” playing distorted church music that drifts along the breeze. The boys stir at the sound, and Jim sneaks off in the night to see the carnival set up, Will darting after him.
Freaks on Parade
The carnival comes to life in the still of night, barely making a sound except the calliope now echoing tunelessly as winds whistle through its tubes. Jim is transfixed, Will unnerved. But when the pair returns later in the morning, the crowds having already turned out, all appears normal—nothing too eerie, despite the carnival’s coterie of weirdos and freaks:
the Illustrated Man, Mr. Dark, co-owner of carnival, whose tattoos writhe and dance;
Mr. Cooger, also known as Mr. Electrico, partner with Mr. Dark in the enterprise and whose hexed carousel can rewind a rider’s age by cycling in reverse as the haunted calliope pipes Chopin’s “Funeral March” backwards;
The Dust Witch, a creaky old fortune teller who can sense fear, hate, longing, and all the other motions of the heart that might entice and trap the vulnerable; and
a whole cast of oddballs, such as Vesuvio the Lava Sipper, the Dwarf, the Thin Man, the Fat Man, the Pinhead, the Wart, the Sheep Boy, and scads more besides.
How did these exiles from society end up under Messrs. Dark and Cooger’s malevolent big tent? The proprietors drew them in, picking up new trophies at every stop along the way. And how did they lure their sorry victims? By giving them what they wanted and—human nature squaring roughly with Augustine’s vision—binding and twisting them in their own off-kilter desires.
The boys realize something is dangerously amiss when their elderly teacher, Miss Foley, wanders into a maze of mirrors and nearly fails to escape. Captivated by the reflection of her youth, she’s almost lost. Indeed, she eventually succumbs.
Will, born a minute before Halloween, resists the attractions; Jim, born a minute into Halloween, seems thoroughly fixated. Bad luck for the two: Mr. Dark wants them both—especially after the boys inadvertently send the carousel careening forward in time with Mr. Cooger aboard, aging the man to death’s doorstep.
The Illustrated Man sends his parade of freaks to scour the town and find the boys. Working the streets, ostensibly to gin up attendees, they hunt Will and Jim, the pair ducking and hiding in any available location. At one point, as they press themselves out of sight below a sidewalk grille, Mr. Dark stands directly above, unknowingly talking with Will’s dad, Charles, who uses a puff of cigar smoke to muddy the Dust Witch’s senses, closing in on the boys.
What Drives the Carnival
Charles Halloway plays a pivotal role in the boys’ fate. A father late in life with a disappointing career as janitor of the town library, Charles has temptations of his own. But he ultimately sees through the wiles of the soul-ensnaring carnival.
Alerted to the dangers the boys face, Charles investigates the carnival from the cache of old newspapers in the library. And there it is! Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Theatre Co. had been to town before, generations ago. Wherever the carnival began—possibly millennia ago—it travels through the world, thriving on human sin, fear, and pain.
“That’s the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the scream from real or imagined wounds,” says Charles when the boys join him in the library to figure out a plan. “The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way.”
When Jim asks if the carnival buys souls, Charles says there’s no need: People would line up to give them away, not knowing what they do. “Those creatures want the flaming gas off souls who can’t sleep nights,” he says, “live and raving soul[s], crisped with self-damnation. . . . The carnival survives, living off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets.”
Charles then speculates on the freaks themselves:
What are they? Sinners who’ve traveled so long, hoping for deliverance, they’ve taken on the shape of their original sins? The Fat Man, what was he once? If I can guess the carnival’s sense of irony, the way they like to weight the scales, he was once a ravener after all kinds and varieties of lust. No matter, there he lives now, anyway, collected up in his bursting skin. The Thin Man, Skeleton, or whatever, did he starve his wife’s, children’s spiritual as well as physical hungers? . . . The fortune-telling, Gypsy Dust Witch? Maybe someone who lived always tomorrow and let today slide . . . and so wound up penalized, having to guess other people’s wild sunrises and sad sunsets.
And the Dwarf? A recent acquisition, none other than the lightning-rod salesman, Tom Fury, shrunken by his own self-concern.
Out of the Mirror Maze?
This insight about the carnival’s fuel ultimately offers a way out, a means to defeat the menace, though Charles and the boys must discover it at the brink of themselves—Charles mangled by a confrontation with Mr. Dark and Will and Jim in his clutches. But it’s there: The great reversal. What defeats fear and hate? Joy and laughter and love. The only question is whether there’s still enough to be found.
Augustine would say yes. Will, Jim, and Charles must find out for themselves.
Something Wicked This Way Comes is book No. 10 in my classic novel goal for 2024. Here’s what I’ve read so far and what’s still in store.
January: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
February: Alice Walker, The Color Purple
March: Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
April: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha
May: Chuang Hua, Crossings
June: Willa Cather, My Àntonia
July: Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
August: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
September: Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
October: Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
November: George Eliot, Middlemarch
December: Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
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Way too long since I've read this one, and I need to revisit it soon. Hadn't run across the Augustine quote before; one of these eons I'll have to look at St. A's Confessions.
Joel, if you haven't read Bradbury's short fiction, you're missing a treat. There are two big collections available, THE STORIES OF RAY BRADBURY and BRADBURY STORIES, that gather just about all of his best short work. Highly recommended.
Not the storyline I would have expected from a “scary book.” Thanks for another compelling review!