When Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives in Green Town, Illinois, one week before Halloween, local boys Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade can hardly believe their good fortune. But as thirteen-year-old Will and Jim watch the carnival train clamor into town at 3:00 a.m., pulling a singing calliope that has no one at the keyboard, the boys quickly realize that this is no ordinary carnival. Instead of cotton candy and innocent childhood fun, the carnival sells temptation and eternal damnation, and the cost of admission is the human soul. Will and Jim soon find themselves locked in a battle between good and evil, and after enlisting the help of Will’s father, Charles, they set out to destroy their enemy. However, it is not only Mr. Dark and his freaks who pose a threat to Will and Jim; the boys must also fight against the temptation of the carnival’s sinister carousel, and their own inner desire to escape the confines of childhood and instantly become men. Through the exploration of good and evil in Something Wicked This Way Comes, author Ray Bradbury argues that there is good and evil in everybody—it is up to each individual to know the difference and act accordingly.
In the novel, Bradbury establishes a dichotomy between the evil of the carnival and the goodness of Will. When Charles explains the carnival to Will and Jim, he likens Mr. Dark and his freaks to “the autumn people,” the evil characters of an old religious story he heard as a child. According to Charles, the autumn people “sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, [and] fill tombs with sinners.” Like the autumn people, the carnival is full of evil. “The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread,” Charles says. “They butter it with pain.” Mr. Dark and his freaks exist only to hurt people, and they subsist on that pain. Will, on the other hand, is good. Bradbury describes him as a boy with “hair as blond-white as milk thistle” and eyes as “open, bright and clear as a drop of summer rain.” Whereas Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show is described in terms of darkness, Will’s description entails lightness and white, which is symbolic of his purity and goodness. The color white is further employed in Charles’s explanation of “white-hat books” and “black-hat books.” Black-hat books involve darker themes and characters like Fu Manchu, Machiavelli, and Dr. Faustus, but Will wears a white-hat and reads Gandhi, St. Thomas, and Buddha. Even Will’s reading habits reflect his inherent goodness. Will is also a loyal friend and son; he risks his own life and soul to help Jim escape Cooger and Dark’s carousel, and constantly reminds Charles that he is a good father. From his physical appearance to his personal preferences and actions, Will is the living embodiment of morals and decency, and he serves as a powerful foil to the depravity of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show.
However, Bradbury complicates the distinction between good and evil, as the carnival relies on individuals choosing to partake in its sinful activities. After Miss Foley, Will and Jim’s seventh-grade teacher, becomes trapped in the carnival’s evil house of mirrors and sees herself reflected as a young girl, she wishes for youth and willingly rides the carousel. Mr. Fury, the traveling lighting-rod salesman, likewise falls to temptation. When he tries to catch a glimpse of the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, he disappears and later resurfaces as the Dwarf in Mr. Dark’s side show with his memory wiped clean. Even after Will and Jim discover the carnival’s evil intent, Jim still struggles with his desire to ride the carousel. “I don’t think I want any more of that,” Jim says, referring to the carousel. “You don’t think!?” Will exclaims. “After all this!? Good grief, let me tell you!” Jim knows that riding the merry-go-round has dangerous consequences—if he rides, he will become part of Cooger and Dark’s carnival—but because his desire to become a man is so strong, he still considers it. The carnival is thus more than just simply evil; it latches onto certain desires that already exist within those who come across it. This, in turn, reflects the fact that human beings are not entirely good or evil. Rather, individuals have the capacity to be either; if human beings did not have the potential for sin, then the carnival would have nothing to prey on.
Good and evil are ultimately a matter of choice within Something Wicked This Way Comes, and this choice must be constantly negotiated. Charles claims that Will’s goodness will “help when things get really tough,” but this may not necessarily be enough. “And men do love sin,” Charles tells Will, “oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells.” It is precisely this love for sin that Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show seeks to exploit. Still, Bradbury argues, the fight between good and evil is not entirely hopeless. “You don’t have to stay foolish and you don’t have to be wrong, evil, sinful, whatever you want to call it,” Charles tells Will and Jim. “There’s more than three or four choices.” In this vein, Bradbury implies that there is danger beyond that represented by Mr. Dark and his wicked carnival, and even after Charles destroys Mr. Dark, he warns Will that “the fight’s just begun.” The carnival won’t be coming back, but new threats of evil will surface. “What will they look like? How will we know them?” Will asks his father. “Why,” Charles responds, “maybe they’re already here.” Everyone—even the purest of souls—has the capacity for evil in the form of temptation, and it is a constant battle to remain good.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Good vs. Evil ThemeTracker
Good vs. Evil Quotes in Something Wicked This Way Comes
And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young anymore…
And Will? Why he’s the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they’re not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it’s not that. It’s just, you know, seeing them pass, that’s how they’ll be all their life; they’ll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? How can it happen to them?
But Jim, now, he sees it happen, he watches for it happening, he sees it start, and he sees it finish, he licks the wounds he expected, and never asks why; he knows. He always knew. Someone knew before him, a long time ago, someone who had wolves for pets and lions for night conversants. Hell, Jim doesn’t know with his mind. But his body knows. And while Will’s putting a bandage on his latest scratch, Jim’s ducking, weaving, bouncing away from the knockout blow which must inevitably come.
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.
“Oh, Jim, Jim, you do see, don’t you? Everything in its time, like the preacher said only last month, everything one by one, not two by two, will you remember?”
“[…] Now, look, since when did you think being good meant being happy?”
“Since always.”
“Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty. And men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells. […]”
“Oh, it would be lovely if you could just be fine, act fine, not think of it all the time. But it’s hard, right? With the last piece of lemon cake waiting in the icebox, middle of the night, not yours, but you lie awake in a hot sweat for it, eh? Do I need tell you? Or, a hot spring day, noon, and there you are chained to your school desk and away off there goes the river, cool and fresh over the rock-fall. Boys can hear clear water like that miles away. So, minute by minutes, hour by hour, a lifetime, it never ends, never stops, you got the choice this second, now this next, and the next after that, be good, be bad, that’s what the clock ticks, that’s what it says in the ticks.”
“‘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.’”
“Then—” Will swallowed— “does that make us…summer people?”
“Not quite.” Charles Halloway shook his head. “Oh, you’re nearer summer than me. If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that’s long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we’ve stashed away. But there are times when we’re all autumn people.”
“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?”
“So, what happens? You get your reward: madness. Change of body, change of personal environment, for one thing. Guilt, for another, guilt at leaving your wife, husband, friends to die the way all men die—Lord, that alone would give a man fits. So more fear, more agony for the carnival to breakfast on. So with the green vapors coming off your stricken conscience you say you want to go back the way you were! The carnival nods and listens. Yes, they promise, if you behave as they say, in a short while they’ll give you back your twoscore and ten or whatever. On the promise alone of being returned to normal old age, that train travels with the world, its side show populated with madmen waiting to be released from bondage, meantime servicing the carnival, giving it coke for its ovens.”
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.
“Will!” His father savagely jabbed a finger at him and at Jim. “Damn it, Willy, all this, all these, Mr. Dark and his sort, they like crying, my God, they love tears! Jesus God, the more you bawl, the more they drink the salt off your chin. Wail and they suck your breath like cats. Get up! Get off your knees, damn it! Jump around! Whoop and holler! You hear! Shout, Will, sing, but most of all laugh, you got that, laugh!”
“Dad, will they ever come back?”
“No. And yes.” Dad tucked away his harmonica. “No, not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they’ll come in next. But sunrise, noon, or at latest, sunset tomorrow they’ll show. They’re on the road.”
“Oh, no,” said Will.
“Oh, yes,” said Dad. “We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fight’s just begun.”
They moved around the carousel slowly.
“What will they look like? How will we know them?”
“Why,” said Dad, quietly, “maybe they’re already here.”
Both boys looked around swiftly.
But there was only the meadow, the machine, and themselves.
“Maybe this isn’t necessary,” said Charles Halloway. “Maybe it wouldn’t run anyway, without the freaks to give it power. But—” He hit the box a last time and threw down the wrench.
“It’s late. Must be midnight straight up.”
Obediently, the City Hall clock, the Baptist church clock, the Methodist, the Episcopalian, the Catholic church, all the clocks, struck twelve. The wind was seeded with Time.
