Halloween isn’t like other holidays. While it’s true I can only really speak for the holidays my family and I celebrate, the act of gathering in a home, enjoying hot food and warm fires, and sharing time with your loved ones feels fairly consistent. Halloween, broadly speaking, doesn’t prioritize any of these things. Halloween pushes you out of your four cozy walls just as winter’s first frosty advances are sending the leaves toppling from their branches. Halloween rejects the light, insisting that its most sacred rituals take place under the cover of night. Halloween eschews the familiar, embracing the weird, the abject, the monstrous. Ray Bradbury understood Halloween, a fact plain to see in many of his writings from The October Country to The Halloween Tree. However, I believe that his 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes most perfectly describes that indrawn breath of terror and delight that is Halloween. Beware, some light spoilers may follow.
I think that having an October birthday predisposes you for hauntings. For me, a childhood full of Halloween-themed birthdays doubled the significance of the season. The jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons, bats, and other of Halloween’s folk seemed to emerge to celebrate my birth, making me price of the festivities and carrier of its phantom spirit. Bradbury seems to agree, as his protagonists take the idea a step further. Will Halloway, born October 30th, 11:59pm, is bright-spirited, sensitive, cautious and loyal. Jim Nightshade, born October 31st, 12:01am, is dark, reserved, impulsive, and fearless. The two boys of thirteen each embody the seasonal spirit differently, Will ever returning to his father, his home, his family as a touchpoint, while Jim pushes ever farther into freedom and mystery. However, this is not a novel in which the children must brave horrors alone, the adults blissfully blind to the atrocities brewing in their small town arcadia. Will’s father, Charles, follows the two into the dark.
It is this tension between child and adult, young and old, past and future, that sets the tone for the novel’s central conflict. On the surface, the book tells the story of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a twisted and demonic carnival that sets its sights on Will and Jim after touching down in their home town. Through this overlying story, Bradbury describes the perspective of the child on Halloween: their world has been invaded by the supernatural, and the inanimate or dead come to life in the flickering dark. Upon closer inspection, however, the characters inner concerns consistently circle back to topics of age and intergenerational understanding. Jim wants to be older, feels that he has seen the darkness of the world but is still too young to protect himself against it. Charles wants to be younger, feels embarrassed about having his first child at 39, and feels discouraged by the age gap between him and his son. This is the novel’s perspective on the adult: holidays express themselves to the fullest through the eyes of children, and it is only in bittersweet remembrances that Charles Halloway is able to find himself the protagonist of his own story. These desires, to be younger or older than you are, have no solutions, save time and acceptance. No solutions, until the Carnival’s profane festivities bring forth a carousel that can wind the years of a life forwards or backwards. Suddenly the hidden desires become attainable, and in doing so become unable to be ignored.
The malleability of age shapes much of the horror of the story. Hierarchies of assumption break down; age ceases to have meaning when it can be turned forward or back like the hands on a clock. The Carnival weaponizes the carousel against its victims, sending them back to helpless childhood, or far forward into decrepitude. Unable to return to their former lives, the victims have no choice but to join the traveling sideshow, becoming just another monstrous attraction to sharpen the teeth of Cooger and Dark themselves. The breaking down of these boundaries, which seem so set in stone, is another characteristic of Halloween. The way the characters choose to respond to this dangerous and unpredictable position is where the true soul of the novel resides.
Ultimately, Something Wicked This Way Comes doesn’t need its commentary on time and age to be a wonderful Halloween novel. Its monstrous cast, from the all-seeing Dust Witch, to the ancient and decaying Mr. Electrico, to the soul-hoarding Illustrated Man, have enough spine-tingling texture to make the novel well worth reading all on their own. However, the way it so subtly interrogates how the fear and magic experienced in childhood changes, or doesn’t change, makes it truly special. The book reminds children that their parents are people too, and reminds adults that rationality falls apart when your very skin is telling you that the horrors unfolding before your eyes are real and true. Halloween thrives on that feeling. When the night is over and you have laughed off all the scares, that chill reminds you that while you may have survived another year, Halloween waits with open arms. If you don’t believe me now, try out the book. Bradbury can certainly convince you.
Happy Halloween!
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