Few books capture the strange magic of October like Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. First published in 1962, this dark fantasy novel still stands as one of the best explorations of childhood fears, aging, temptation, and the sinister carnival lurking just beyond the safe borders of small-town life. It’s a story where the smell of cotton candy and popcorn can just as easily make your skin crawl as it can make your mouth water.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Back of Book Cover Blurb

From GoodReads:

One of Ray Bradbury’s best-known and most popular novels, Something Wicked This Way Comes, now featuring a new introduction and material about its longstanding influence on culture and genre.

For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Two boys will discover the secret of its smoke, mazes, and mirrors; two friends who will soon know all too well the heavy cost of wishes…and the stuff of nightmares.

Few novels have endured in the heart and memory as has Ray Bradbury’s unparalleled literary masterpiece Something Wicked This Way Comes. Scary and suspenseful, it is a timeless classic in the American canon.

–Something Wicked This Way Comes (by Ray Bradbury) (on GoodReads)

The Setup: October Comes Early

Bradbury drops us right into Green Town, Illinois—a stand-in for his own hometown of Waukegan—where two best friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, are on the cusp of their 14th birthdays. They are mirror images of each other: Will is cautious, golden-haired, and reluctant to step into danger; Jim is impulsive, dark-haired, and constantly peering over the fence into adulthood.

Their bond is tested when Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show rolls into town. A traveling carnival that doesn’t arrive with trucks and trailers but with storms, smoke, and a foreboding sense of inevitability. On the surface, it’s the standard fair: Ferris wheels, sideshows, and barkers. But soon the boys realize this carnival doesn’t just offer fun—it offers your deepest desire, at a steep and terrible cost.

Themes: Fear, Temptation, and Time

At its heart, Something Wicked This Way Comes is about the passage of time and how we wrestle with it. Charles Halloway, Will’s father, is one of the most memorable characters in Bradbury’s canon. A janitor at the town library, he feels the ache of middle age—too old to be young, too young to be old—and struggles with what it means to be a good father. His late-night musings in the library are some of the most hauntingly beautiful passages Bradbury ever wrote.

Then there’s the carnival itself. Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, tempts townsfolk with what they think they want most: youth, beauty, power, or escape. The carousel at the heart of the carnival is both wondrous and horrifying—it can spin you forward into adulthood or backward into childhood, but it always exacts a price. The deeper message is classic Bradbury: beware of shortcuts. Life is meant to be lived through, not skipped over.

Bradbury’s Prose: Poetry in the Dark

Bradbury is never just about plot—he’s about language. His sentences crackle and dance with metaphor, like carnival lights flickering in the distance. Some readers find his prose dense, but for those willing to sink into it, Something Wicked is pure literary hypnosis. He describes October in ways that feel eternal, as if he captured the very essence of autumn and poured it into ink.

This isn’t a “sit down and skim” book—it’s a novel that demands you savor each page. The imagery of lightning rods, circus tents, and illustrated tattoos lingers long after you’ve finished.

Why It Still Matters

Sixty-plus years later, Something Wicked This Way Comes remains eerily timeless. Its themes of temptation, fear, and the fleeting nature of youth are universal. For teenagers, it’s a thrilling gothic adventure. For adults, it’s a mirror held up to the anxieties of aging, parenting, and responsibility.

It’s also a quintessential “October read.” Few novels so perfectly evoke the mood of chilly nights, whispering winds, and the sense that something—good or bad—might be waiting just around the corner.

Final Thoughts

Something Wicked This Way Comes is both a carnival ride and a meditation on life’s greatest mysteries. It’s spooky without being gruesome, profound without being pretentious, and endlessly re-readable.

If you want a book that makes you feel 14 again, standing on the edge of childhood with your best friend at your side and a storm rolling in over the horizon, this is it.

Rating:

I give it 4 stars on GoodReads, and 3.5 on LibraryThing.

Average GoodReads rating is 3.90 (as of 5.2.25).

Perfect for: fans of gothic fantasy, autumn reading lists, and anyone who loves their horror tinged with poetry and philosophy.

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Let’s start right out of the gate on this book review and go right into it – this is not by J.R.R. Tolkien or his son Christopher Tolkien. I’m just pointing this out right out of the gate to let everyone know its more of a compendium piece than anything else. There is no fiction in this book, its a ‘look at the map and history of Middle-Earth’.

J.R.R. Tolkien was a one of a kind writer, linguist, scholar, and world builder. Obviously most known for his Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Middle-Earth books, he’s written lots of other scholar pieces on English and British literature and folklore. He also worked on the original Oxford Encyclopedia Dictionary.

From Wikipedia:

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL (/ˈruːl ˈtɒlkiːn/, ROOL TOL-keen;^[a] 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university, to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, positions he held from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.

After Tolkien’s death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father’s extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and, within it, Middle-earth.^[b] Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.

While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the “father” of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy.

J.R.R. Tolkien (Wikipedia)

You can read more about Tolkien himself, and his book – The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun in my book review that can be found here: Book Review: The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun (J.R.R. Tolkien).

Middle-Earth

Middle-Earth is one of the most iconic fantasy worlds. Right there with Narnia, Hogwarts, Westeros, Oz, Midgard, Asgard, The Continent, Azeroth, the various Star Wars planets (Tatooine, Coruscant, Naboo, Yavin IV, Endor, etc.), etc, etc.

So its only obvious that people would have a very vested interest in it and want to learn more about the world of Middle-Earth. So thats where this compendium comes in handy. It is a wonderful look at the world that Tolkien created and how it evolved from the beginning (both in universe and out of universe) to where it is at the end of the Lord of the Rings.

This book does take a look at the world of Middle-Earth from its earliest creation days, from the very act of its creation all the way until the sailing off of the Elves and Frodo at the end of the Lord of the Rings. This covers the texts themselves (Silmarillion, Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, etc.) as well as notes and other copies and texts from Christopher Tolkien.

Book Review

Let’s jump into the book review proper now. This is a good compendium book. Its a super quick read, with most entries being one page blurbs. There are articles for the ages, with inforgraphics and charts, there are geographical and town articles, and there are people and monster articles.

The pages are mostly intercut with wonderful artwork from a variety of different fans and groups. The artwork is really wonderful if not fully refined. You can tell that its mostly artwork already made, and then the book publisher / writer / group approached them for the work, rather than a polished bought set piece.

The articles about the ages are informative and give you a good synopsis of what happened, the events, what led to what, the way and how of the land. Its not an extremely in depth geographical account, and doesn’t give you a true lay of the lands however. The one page interludes about various characters and monsters are nice, but are such quick blurbs that it feels like their just space fillers. (And a way to get more artwork and pages into the book.)

While the book is informative, it does gloss over many things, and with it being such a quick read, it should only take two or three days to read this. The book is a good lead in or refresher for the upcoming Amazon Prime show, but for a true super hardcore Tolkien / Lord of the Rings / Middle-Earth nerd, this won’t go as far (mileage may vary).

The book’s design, appearance, craftsmanship is nice. The artwork is good, and the writing isn’t vanilla bland, but nothing extraordinary. It does a wonderful job acting as a primer or refresher, but other than that, its not quite the greatest.

GoodReads blurb:

This lavish, colour atlas is a complete guide to the weird and wonderful geography of Tolkien’s world. Packed with full page maps and illustrations of events in the annals of Middle-earth, it is the perfect companion to the bestselling A Dictionary of Tolkien. This book is unofficial and is not authorised by the Tolkien Estate or HarperCollins Publishers.

An Atlas of Tolkien (David Day) (GoodReads)

My Rating

My ratings:

• My GoodReads: ***
• Global Average GoodReads Rating: 4.12 (as of 4.20.22)
• My LibraryThing: ***

Thanks For Reading

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