When discussing Ray Bradbury’s novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I told friends that the movie was better. There are only a few times I’ve said that about a book and movie, but I don’t think Bradbury would have been disappointed by that viewpoint. The Afterword of the book explains why.

Bradbury wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes as a screenplay. He dug up an old short story because he wanted to write a movie for Gene Kelly to produce. Kelly loved the screenplay, and shopped it around with himself as director and producer, but he couldn’t come up with the money. So, he turned it back to Bradbury, who went on to write the book. The novel came out in 1962. Then, it became a series of screenplays again, and Disney came calling, and turned it into a wonderful movie with Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce. So, Ray Bradbury intended this to be a movie.

The book takes place in October in Green Town, Illinois. One year, Halloween arrived in the town at 3 a.m. on October 24 when Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show arrived. Two boys, almost fourteen, Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade, were eager to find out all the secrets of the carnival. But, as Will discovers the carousel that runs backwards as it plays Chopin’s “Funeral March”, he realizes that people riding that carousel grow younger and younger. Jim’s still eager to experience everything the carnival has to offer, but Will is afraid for his friend and himself.

Will’s father, Charles, has his own fears. His are about age and death. He was older when Will was born, and he is aware that he can’t run and do the other things a younger man would do with his son. Charles Holloway is the janitor at the public library, a well-read man who will have to face his fears if Will and Jim, Charles and Green Town are to survive the carnival.

While Bradbury’s words are as poetic as ever, phrases such as “The October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young anymore”, the book seems to drag, and the movie does not. The music of the movie creates a haunting atmosphere. Jason Robards is Charles Holloway, a librarian, in the movie, and Pryce plays the evil, spooky Mr. Dark.

Why a carousel? Ray Bradbury was terrified by a carousel when he was four. “I seem never to have found a way to get off.” His book plays on childhood fears, as well as adult fears of old age and death.

Something Wicked This Way Comes. Look for the movie instead of the book.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. William Morrow, 1962. ISBN 9780380977277 (hardcover), 295p.


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