Something Wicked This Way Comes
Ray Bradbury (1962)
“A traveling carnival offers you everything you ever wanted — your youth back, your secret desires fulfilled — and it only costs your soul.”
Short Summary
Two thirteen-year-old boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, discover that a mysterious carnival has arrived in their small Illinois town one October night. Led by the sinister Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, the carnival preys on townspeople's deepest desires — offering youth to the old, maturity to the young, beauty to the plain — but every gift is a trap that enslaves the recipient. When the boys learn the carnival's secret, Mr. Dark hunts them through the town. It falls to Will's father Charles, a fifty-four-year-old librarian who considers himself a failure, to defeat the carnival — not through violence, but through laughter, love, and the radical acceptance of mortality.
Detailed Summary
In Green Town, Illinois, on an October night one week before Halloween, two boys born minutes apart on either side of midnight — Will Halloway just before, Jim Nightshade just after — sense something wrong in the autumn air. A lightning rod salesman named Tom Fury arrives with warnings of a coming s...