author of something wicked this way comes

Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show is genuinely creepy, even a little scary at times. There is a little bit of rumination about good and evil and the cost of desiring things you shouldn't, but while this book is a good read, it's not particularly deep or novel.īradbury puts a classically American spin on the Faustian trope.

The heroes of the story, a pair of 13-year-old boys, have to defeat Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show with the power of heart, and a little help from Will Halloway's father, who knows something about these 'Autumn People,' as he calls them, who have haunted communities since time immemorial with their whispered promises and dark pacts and feasting on suffering. They frenzy forth.Such are the autumn people.” They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. Like all Devil's deals, those who take him up on it find themselves enslaved or worse.įor these beings, fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Dark,' aka 'The Illustrated Man,' is the Mephistopheles of this dark fantasy, offering eternal youth and other promises. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a classic dark fantasy novel by Ray Bradbury, in which a sinister carnival comes to town, far too late in the year, and proceeds to grant its residents' secret desires. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show's smoke, mazes, and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes - and the stuff of nightmare.

In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Few American novels written this century have endured in the heart and mind as has this one - Ray Bradbury's incomparable masterwork of the dark fantastic.Ī carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time.

Author of something wicked this way comes