Something Wicked This Way Comes
“A bit of a SPOILER WARNING with this one - but I’ll just start by saying it’s just a really fun little book full of evocative imagery and profound themes. Simple but not simplistic and childlike but not childish. Darkly disturbing but charmingly innocent. Honestly I wish I’d been more aware of all the things that kept occurring to me as I was reading Something Wicked, because by the time I really had a conscious sense of how many thoughts it got rolling around in my head, it was one of those things where it would’ve been much better if I’d been making notes all along. But here’s what I remember, or think I remember, and all of what follows is the spoilery stuff. This is just my thing about this book — 1) Just like the 27-year cycle for Pennywise the Clown in Stephen King’s IT, in Something Wicked an evil Carnival comes through town on a cycle of every 30 years. 2) In both books that evil is partly associated with clowns, or at least they both feature an association to the carnival atmosphere 3) In both books the evil specifically operates and thrives on exploiting people’s fears 4) In both books the history of the evil’s cyclical nature is discovered by someone who frequents the town library. 5) At the end of both books, there’s something about unnatural aging or being struck by the appearance of aging 6) At the end of both books, someone is revived through revisiting an act that embodies a sort of childlike innocence and purity 7) Also this is just very small thing and it might have to do with the limitations of my own reading experiences, but, Something Wicked and another book of Stephen King’s, Pet Sematary, are the only two works in which I’ve come across the term “Deadfall” — not that “Deadfall” isn’t otherwise a word, of course, but these books are the only two places I’ve come across it in literary fiction. 8) At the start of a certain chapter in Something Wicked, someone’s sense of fear is sort of described as indescribable or nameless, and all they can think to call the source of the fear is “It””
