Something Wicked This Way Comes

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the book Bradbury considered his most personal. It is set in Green Town, Illinois, the fictionalised Waukegan of his childhood, and it centres on two thirteen-year-old boys, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, who are best friends and opposites: one drawn to darkness, one instinctively pulling back from it.

Into their town comes Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, a carnival that arrives at three in the morning and offers its visitors exactly what they most desire: youth, beauty, power, revenge. The price, as always, is everything that makes you human.

The novel is really a meditation on the relationship between fathers and sons, between age and youth, between the temptation to escape time and the necessity of living within it. Charles Halloway, Will's father, is one of Bradbury's finest characters: a man who has made peace with regret and finds in that peace a kind of heroism. Bradbury was writing, as he always was, about himself.