Something Wicked This Way Comes begins just one week before Halloween, and the novel is fittingly pervaded by a sense of fear and filled with references to the supernatural. Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade’s own names reflect this spooky holiday, which also happens to be Jim’s birthday (Will, for his part, was born just one minute before Halloween). When Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives, it is not long before a palpable dread blankets the entire town. Mr. Dark and the carnival rely on the town’s natural fear of the unknown, using seemingly unexplainable—and, the thinking goes, unstoppable—supernatural elements to terrorize the town. According to Will’s father, Charles, “the carnival wisely knows we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But…Nothing? Where do you hit it?…So the carnival just shakes a great croupier’s cupful of Nothing at us, and reaps us as we tumble back head-over-heels in fright.” It is only after Charles faces Mr. Dark head on and confronts his fears that he can finally defeat the evil of the traveling carnival, and it is in this way that Bradbury effectively argues that fear only has as much power as individuals grant it. The carnival itself further becomes an allegory for fear of the unknown, and it’s only by facing that fear—by effectively accepting that certain things cannot be explained or understood—that it can be defeated.
Mr. Dark and his side show freaks rely on the supernatural to threaten Green Town, and they actively terrorize the people. As the carnival pulls into town, a railcar hauls a mysterious calliope that appears to be playing by itself. Will and Jim stare in disbelief as the musical instrument “wails” with no one at the keyboard, chilled and entranced by what appears to be a supernatural event unfolding right before their eyes. Later, when Mr. Cooger, Mr. Dark’s business partner, rides on the carnival’s broken carousel in reverse with Chopin’s “Funeral March” playing backwards, the middle-aged man transforms into a boy of twelve. Mr. Cooger stays this way until he again rides the merry-go-round, this time in the opposite direction, and transforms into an old man. The Dust Witch, Mr. Dark’s most powerful freak, can stop the human heart using only her thoughts, and she can also “feel” the thoughts of others. Additionally, Mr. Dark too has the power to shift into a younger version of himself, and he even has strange tattoos of Will and Jim on the palms of his hands that inflict physical pain on the boys when he clenches his fists and wrings his hands. Mr. Dark and the freaks instill fear through their use of supernatural power. The supernatural nature of the carnival compounds its terror, which seems to be something inexplicable and uncontrollable.
Furthermore, while Jim, Will, and Charles are convinced that the carnival is responsible for the disappearance of several people in town, there is an air of mystery that surrounds these disappearances, which implies a fear of the unknown. As Will lays eyes on the Dwarf in Mr. Dark’s freakshow, Will is certain that he recognizes him. “I know him,” thinks Will. “Oh, God, what they’ve done to him! The lightning-rod salesman! That’s who it is. Squeezed tight, smashed small, convulsed by some terrible nature into a clenched fist of humanity…” Will doesn’t know how Mr. Dark has done it, but the Dwarf is clearly Mr. Fury. After Will and Jim find Miss Foley, their fifty-year-old schoolteacher, transformed into a terrified young girl after riding Cooger and Dark’s carousel, she quickly vanishes. Bradbury never reveals what happens to Miss Foley after Charles defeats Mr. Dark and the evil carnival and this too adds to the fear of the unknown within Something Wicked This Way Comes. Mr. Crosetti, the local barber, likewise goes missing when the carnival comes to town. Like Miss Foley, Mr. Crosetti’s fate is never revealed. The mystery surrounding all of these events further adds to the story’s sense of dread.
Above all, the carnival attempts to frighten its victims through its invocation of the ultimate unknown: death. The carnival notably taps into Charles’s own fear of growing old and the sense of mortality that inevitably entails. Charles appreciates the “simplicity” of the carnival’s efforts to scare him. “Hit an old man with mirrors,” he says, “watch his pieces fall in jigsaws of ice only the carnival can put together again. How? Waltz around back on the carousel to ‘Beautiful Ohio’ or ‘Merry Widow.’” Yet in the end, when Charles destroys Mr. Dark, he does so by denying the fear and power that the carnival has. “Evil has only the power that we give it,” Charles says. “I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.” When Charles finally refuses to believe in the evil of Mr. Dark and the death that he represents, and once he accepts his own advancing age and mortality, Charles is finally able to overcome his fears and defeat the sinister carnival.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Fear, the Supernatural, and the Unknown ThemeTracker
Fear, the Supernatural, and the Unknown Quotes in Something Wicked This Way Comes
And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young anymore…
For, he thought, it’s a special hour. Women never wake then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men in middle age? They know that hour well. Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death!
Will saw the evil boy, a year older still, glide around into the night. Five or six more times around and he’d be bigger than the two of them!
“Jim, he’ll kill us!”
“Not me, no!”
Will felt a sting of electricity. He yelled, pulled back, hit the switch handle. The control box spat. Lightning jumped to the sky, Jim and Will, flung by the blast, lay watching the merry-go-round run wild.
“‘For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ’s birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles—breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.’”
“Oh gosh,” said Will. “It’s hopeless!”
“No. The very fact we’re here worrying about the difference between summer and autumn, makes me sure there’s a way out. You don’t have to stay foolish and you don’t have to be wrong, evil, sinful, whatever you want to call it. There’s more than three or four choices. They, that Dark fellow and his friends don’t hold all the cards, I could tell that today, at the cigar store. I’m afraid of him but, I could see, he was afraid of me. So there’s fear on both sides. Now how can we use it to advantage?”
“Is…is it…Death?”
“The carnival?” The old man lit his pipe, blew smoke, seriously studied the patterns. “No. But I think it uses Death as a threat. 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. And the carnival wisely knows we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But…Nothing? Where do you hit it? Has it a heart, soul, butt-behind, brain? No, no. So the carnival just shakes a great croupier’s cupful of Nothing at us, and reaps us as we tumble back head-over-heels in fright.”
And then, at last, he gave the maze, the mirrors, and all Time ahead, Beyond, Around, Above, Behind, Beneath or squandered inside himself, the only answer possible.
He opened his mouth very wide, and let the loudest sound of all free.
The Witch, if she were alive, would have known that sound, and died again.
He gathered the boy somewhat closer and thought, Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.
The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we’ve done fine tonight. Even Death can’t spoil it. So, there went the boys…and why not…follow?
