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Posted By: Magus Jan 06, 2005 - 06:28 pm

Here's the SSR paper I wrote on the book, which I read earlier in the quarter. It's less then a page long.


I was impressed after my reading of Ray Bradburry’s Fahrenheit 451. I was eager to read another one of his works. After having it recommended to me, I decided to read his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Something Wicked This Way Comes begins in October, a month associated with the horrifying, the mystical and the surreal. An unnamed lightning rod salesman comes on the eve of a great storm. He claims that lightening will strike one of their houses and immediately points out which one it is.

The story develops as a Circus comes to town at this most curious time for circuses. The boys find their teacher nearly sucked into the Funhouse mirrors as she claims to have seen her younger self in them. She leaves for home with her nephew, who may not be her nephew at all.

They boys follow him and are then framed for thieving the jewelry of their teacher. They chase him down and around the carousel that begins to age the boy into the man he truly is, and then some more. Soon, before the carousel is stopped he is little more then a withered corpse.

The supernatural forces are at work with the circus, and it is toying with the boys. They enlist the help of one of the boys’ father, the local librarian who was too timid to make his mark on the world and so spends his lonely nights in the library. But what of this line from “Hamlet” that is so strangely alluring:

“By the prickling in my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a pleasing work of fiction to read. It is pleasing, but a disappointment when it comes after the likes of Fahrenheit 451.

Unlike in the aforementioned novel, the characters don’t seem very well developed. They are shells of people that don’t seem to have the coherency to be considered fully developed characters. They simply seem to lack the proper cohesion that draws aspects and ideas into living and breathing characters.

While pleasingly surreal, many of the events are in question. Certain things seem known for no reason at all while others are shaded over with vagueness and obscurity. There is no explanation for events and certain tangents seem to drone on for pages while other end with the turn of a page. While it is a decent book, it is sub par with Bradburry’s other works.