by Ray Bradbury (1920)
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Picture this: two thirteen-year-old boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, frozen on a crisp October night in Green Town, Illinois, as the distant wail of a calliope snakes through the dark, promising delights that twist into nightmares. The carnival has come, unannounced, pitching its tents on the edge of innocence, and from that first seductive note, Something Wicked This Way Comes sinks its hooks into you like the cold autumn wind Bradbury conjures so vividly.
Will, pale and thoughtful, born a minute before midnight on October 30th, and Jim, dark-haired and reckless, born a minute after on Halloween, sneak into the midway under starlight. They ride the carousel that spins backward in time, watching Mr. Cooger age a hundred years in shriveled seconds, his freckles blooming into liver spots. The rush hits you—the giddy spin of boyish adventure slamming into primal terror as the Witch on the carousel senses their intrusion, her blind eyes flaring green. Bradbury doesn’t just tell you about dread; he makes your skin prickle with it, every shadow in your room lengthening as you read.
Then there’s Charles Halloway, Will’s father, the quiet janitor at the town library, whose late-night monologue on joy and sorrow becomes a thunderclap of wisdom. When he confronts Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man whose tattoos writhe with captured souls, you feel the weight of a father’s desperate love battling cosmic evil. The Mirror Maze shatters illusions, reflecting your own fears back at you—flabby regrets, lost youths—while the bullet-through-the-apple trick lodges in your gut like a promise of violence. Bradbury’s prose crackles like lightning over the prairie, poetic without pretension, turning everyday Americana into a fever dream of temptation and redemption.
What sets this apart from the genre’s rote monster hunts? Bradbury fuses the supernatural with the ache of growing up, where the real horror isn’t just the freaks in the sideshow but the carousel’s whisper that you can buy back lost time—for a price. It’s influenced the shadowy carnivals in later tales, from Gaiman’s American Gods to King’s Derry underbelly, but this one pulses with original Midwestern magic.
If you loved the small-town chills of Salem’s Lot or the mythic unease of Gaiman’s Neverwhere, this will claim you completely.
Grab it tonight—the calliope’s calling your name.
Author portrait: Photo: Alan Light | License: CC BY 2.0
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