Something Wicked This Way Comes

First appearing as the short story “The Black Ferris” in the May 1948 issue of Weird Tales, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes went through an intermediate stage as an unproduced screen treatment for Gene Kelly in 1955 before the author expanded it into the novel published by Simon & Schuster in 1962. If Bradbury’s 1957 novel Dandelion Wine is the summer panel in the author’s nostalgic portrait of childhood in small-town America, Something Wicked This Way Comes may be considered its darker autumnal counterpart. The magic that had imbued everyday life in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois in the earlier episodic novel here becomes incarnate in the shape of Mr. Dark and his carnival; but all these new marvels cast shadows, teasing at innocence while attempting to corrupt it, and promising wonders that take morality and mortality as their toll. It is a work which captures dread and heroism, horror and lyricism, power and compassion, with characters as venal or lovable as any encountered in real life. Jack Clayton’s 1983 film for Disney recreated much of the book’s plot and atmosphere for the screen, but there is a verbal sorcery at play in Ray Bradbury’s novel, which only he could capture.