Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes”

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“Oh, hell, don’t let them drink your tears and want more! Will! Don’t let them take your crying, turn it upside down and use it for their own smile! I’ll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags. Don’t feed them one damn thing, Willy, loosen your bones! Breathe! Blow!” – Charles Halloway in Something Wicked This Way Comes

In the long history of letters, there are few voices as distinct as that of Ray Bradbury.

Many years ago, Bradbury stated that he viewed his books as works of cinema rendered on paper. It can hardly be argued that the man was a master at laying out a scene and bringing it to life, but the man’s love of film did nothing to detract from his uniquely exuberant storytelling voice, and that voice might have never been put to finer use than in Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Bradbury’s masterpiece of dark fantasy, Something Wicked, has an interesting history. It was originally written as a ten page short story, then expanded into a screenplay that was never produced, then repurposed into a novel, and finally transformed back into a screenplay that was ultimately made into a film. Through all of this, the novel’s language didn’t lose a bit of Bradbury’s characteristic passion and wit.

Unlike today’s oft-homogenized writing styles, Something Wicked hits in the ear like the voice of your crazy, drunk, brilliant uncle telling stories around a campfire. Your dad always told you to stay away from crazy old Uncle Ray, but you never listened.

In fact, Uncle Ray is your favorite family member of all, becaue you know that he’s the one guy in the whole family that’s NOT crazy. While the others are sitting around stuffy dinner parties or vegetating in front of television sets, ol’ Unlce Ray is wandering around in the thrill of an open night, barking poetry at the stars.

He’ll never be a great accountant or an actuary or a chief of police, or any other sort of upstanding occupation, but within his realm of specialization he is a doctor, a scientist, and an artist all at once, and within that world he can make absolute miracles happen right here on Earth.

There are lines in Something Wicked that only Ray Bradbury could have written. They are lines of strange wisdom, magical insight, or simply unparalleled description. Consider this:

“Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.”

“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.”

“Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt.”

“Once, as a boy, sneaking the cool grottos behind a motion picture theater screen, on his way to a free seat, he had glanced up and there towering and flooding the haunted dark seen a woman’s face as he had never seen it since, of such size and beauty built of milk-bone and moon-flesh as to freeze him there alone behind the stage, shadowed by the motion of her lips, the bird-wing flicker of her eyes, the snow-pale-death-shimmering illumination from her cheeks.”

It is Bradbury’s distinctly vital prose that takes Something Wicked from being just another adventure yarn and turns it into something greater.

First, to be clear, the book does work perfectly well as an adventure yarn, and would earn its place of immortality on those grounds alone. From the moment that the salesman flops into town with his bag of lightning rods, from the time we hear the first hinting echoes of that haunted calliope cry, Something Wicked takes us on an engaging adventure.

But the novel is much more than an adventure story. The characters play out an allegory that plays with concepts of time, youth, friendship, father and son relationships, mortality and memory. Those themes are brought to life by the novel’s ebullient language. The prose is tireless, just as boys are, and sometimes teeters on the edge of melodrama, just as boys do.

Through the novel’s words, we enter the idyllic headspace of boyhood, both the boyhood of boys and the boyhood of men. While moving through that territory, the potential loss of youth and optimism seem so much more terrible than they would without Bradbury’s language. This heightened sense of empathy and concern gives the book a sort of timeless, fairy tale quality.

The book isn’t perfect. There are some flabby sections in the middle where the writing seems to just drag on. During one section, I even found myself wondering if the author was dragging things out just to bulk up the word count. Obviously, that’s purely speculation, and simply the thought that drifted into my mind. I only know for certain that some parts of the book rambled enough that I started scanning ahead, and I very rarely do that while reading a book I enjoy.

But, a slip of fortune cookie paper once advised me that one should never judge a work of art by its flaws, and I always strive to adhere to that wisdom.

As far as I’m concerned, the only thing that ultimately matters about a book is the sum total of the reading experience it provides. I see no point in dissecting smaller parts of qualities and magnifying flaws under my scrutiny.

All that matters to me is that Something Wicked left me wholly inspired to write, to love, and to live. Not many books have ever done that for me. Of those that did, very few were fantasy or science fiction. Only a work of art could hit me with that kind of inspiration.

That’s what Bradbury always stood for: passion, wonder, and joy. Somewhere along the way in American history, ‘cool’ became the nation’s desired character. So many people today are like sitcom characters…sarcastic, dispassionate, unmoved, living moment by moment in anticipation of delivering a snarky one liner that will set the canned laughter rolling.

I never understood the appeal of ‘cool,’ and I doubt that Bradbury did, either. In the grave we’ll be damn cold forever, and shivering wish we had time to run again beneath the open sky and be wild and loud and alive. Ray understood that. He knew it and  never forgot it and embedded that wisdom in his stories.
See, Uncle Ray wasn’t cool. No, he was full of fire and compassion, venom and love, fits of dancing. He was alive. Even in his later years of life, in interviews he shook the camera glass with the force of his vitality. He always said a writer should love life first. Only after loving life should he or she touch pen to paper. That internal fire is on display in Something Wicked This Way Comes. The book is a gift left behind by crazy old Uncle Ray, for us to return to whenever we need to be reminded of certain things.
In the novel, Charles Halloway explains to his son that joy is the one defense against the forces of evil. “A single smile,” he advises Will, “the night people can’t stand it.” In that scene, I can’t help but hear Bradbury’s voice speaking directly to the reader, calling to them through the wicked calliope music to show them the way home.

Keep smiling, he was telling us. Keep smiling no matter what the goddamn night people say.
Thanks for the tip, Uncle Ray.

P.S. I’ve added the movie version of Something Wicked This Way Comes below. I have not yet seen the movie. I will be watching it tonight.