Fred's Book Club: Mr. Dark.

Hello again, readers, and welcome to another episode of the Humpback Writers, our Wednesday book feature. To date we have had no writers with actual Quasimodo-type humps, and if we don't on the day before Halloween, it's looking less likely that we ever will. But we do have a scary classic for you today, one of my all-time favorites.

When Ray Bradbury published Something Wicked This Way Comes in 1962, he was a long-established writer, primarily of science fiction but almost entirely of short stories. It was his second novel, after the more and still famous Fahrenheit 451 (two other books published as novels, Dandelion Wine and of course The Martian Chronicles were assembled from previously published short stories). Unlike the futuristic Fahrenheit and many of his science fiction stories, Something Wicked takes place in the contemporary era, or at least as it was when Bradbury was a boy in the Midwest, ninety years ago.

It's a small Midwestern town, in the autumn, much too late for a carnival, when Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives in the dead of night. Then very strange things start to happen. The heroes of the book, Jim Nightshade, his friend Will Halloway, and Will's father Charles, will face many terrors in the days to follow.

It may sound pretty clichéd now, but despite carnivals having been kind of creepy forever, I don't know that anyone ever did them so well as Bradbury. Not even Charles Finney, whose Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) is also a classic of the form. What happens in Something Wicked doesn't always seem like much at first, but is always truly eerie, painted by Bradbury's colorful, sensual flourishes. You might come across a boy, for example, who has literally ridden the calliope too many times:

One hand hung off the platform.
     It did not belong to a boy.
     It seemed like a huge wax hand shriveled by fire.
     The man's hair was long, spidery, white. It blew like milkweed in the breathing dark.
     They bent to see the face.
     The eyes were mummified shut. The nose was collapsed upon gristle. The mouth was a ruined white flower, the petals twisted into a thin wax sheath over the clenched teeth through which faint bubblings sighed. The man was small inside his clothes, small as a child, but tall, strung out, and old, so old, very old, not ninety, not one hundred, no, not one hundred ten, but one hundred twenty or one hundred thirty impossible years old.
     Will touched.
     The man was cold as an albino frog. 

Later in the book, when Mr. Dark takes a more personal interest, and goes looking for the boys, things get hairy:

"Smart hide-and-seekers, both," said Mr. Dark. "But someone's smarter. Did you hear the carousel calliope tonight? Did you know, someone dear to you was down to the carousel? Will? Willy? William. William Halloway. Where's your mother tonight?"
     Silence.
     "She was out riding the night wind, Willy-William. Around. We put her on. Around. We left her on. Around. You hear, Willy? Around, a year, another year, another, around, around! ...
     "Around, around, and when we let your mother off, boy, and showed her herself in the Mirror Maze, you should have heard the one single sound she made. She was like a cat with a hair ball in her so big and sticky there was no way to gag it out, no way to scream around the hair coming out of her nostrils and ears and eyes, boy, and her old old old. ..."

I've read plenty of books that are scary, but Bradbury can be absolutely visceral. Mr. Dark came to play, yo.

I never wanted to see the film version of the book, made in 1983. It seemed the definition of an unfilmable book. So much happens inside characters' heads (true for his work in general) that could only be shown visually by a director of extraordinary genius, and I don't think from the reviews that even Jack Clayton was up to the task. If you've read any of Bradbury's suspense stories, you might figure that a Bradbury character, seen in real life, is a guy who just stands there and goes nuts. From outside it's just strange, but from inside it makes all the interior sense that insanity can provide. That's why I never bothered with The Ray Bradbury Theater either; a story like "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" is terrific reading but, to not test the patience of the film audience, would have to have a running time of five to ten minutes tops. (And I'd rather not discuss the 1980 Martian Chronicles miniseries before breakfast.)

Something Wicked is a chilling book, not only because the evil is so close, and seems unstoppable, but because it also is often so tempting. The carnival tempts our three heroes in different ways right up to about the end of the book. The boys are on the cusp of manhood; the father feels old and failed; men torn in life by different ways, faced with an evil that thrives on exploiting them. Can they pass the test? Can they even survive? Neither are givens in Bradbury's dark fiction.

When I first encountered Bradbury in high school, I wanted to write just like him -- but it is much harder than it looks. I've never gotten close, and finally just had to try to find my own style. Sometimes I'll forget him for a while, and then I'll grab one of his newer books or pick up an older one again and wow! What a great writer.

I was sad when I heard he'd died in 2012, even though he was 91, and would have needed to run on the calliope backward to stay around much longer. He's the only book writer I ever sent a fan letter to, and he wrote back very cordially, which made my decade.

And speaking of decades, I last read this book ten years ago almost to the day -- I know because when I dug out my copy I found a bus ticket inside that I'd been using for a bookmark. The date stamp was 10/23/09. Time for another ride on Mr. Dark's calliope, perhaps?

The October country.

And so it begins -- ever slightly, but begins.

OCTOBER COUNTRY...
...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain...

--Ray Bradbury, The October Country

No point in fighting it; October is here. Let us not panic as I normally do with thoughts of how we are going to pay the Christmas bills -- yes, it will be tree-trimming time before we know it. But let's try to remember what October was like when we were kids. It was one of the loooooongest months of the year, because Halloween was at the end of it and Halloween was awesome. Also, the initial thrill of a new school year was long gone by now, and the days would drag on and on.

Now everything rushes forward -- the days may be long but the months are short. Can't we apply the brakes a little?

October was always my favorite month as a kid. I know some people always prefer the summer, and that's understandable if they have fun summer plans. I liked not being in school, of course, but I hated the heat and humidity, which usually get in New York City in spades. We did not have air conditioning. I know some people really enjoy the hot and humid weather of July and August, and yet these people are allowed to walk about free like normal people.

Ray Bradbury was the poet of October. He is -- wrongly, I think -- remembered as a science fiction writer. Mostly he wrote scary stories, travel stories, mystery stories, magical stories. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston's 1956 film Moby Dick. He wrote a lot of SF stories, yes, but he was not capable of writing hard science fiction, the way Robert Heinlein did. Heinlein had an engineer's soul and could do math. I get the feeling that Bradbury couldn't balance his checkbook. But who cares? He wrote like an October angel.

A friend of mine growing up would always be willing to trade his "left nut" for something of inestimable value -- "I'd give my left nut to have a date with her" "I'd give my left nut to play like Hendrix" "I'd give my left nut to drive a Testarossa" -- etc. I don't know what the going rate for testicles was supposed to be, but clearly he thought it was very high. If it still is, I'd like to make a deal regarding Bradbury's writing ability. My friend never found a taker for his nut, though, so I suppose there's no deal to be made.

I was thinking yesterday, on a bright, sunlit morning, that it was interesting that Bradbury chose October. November is far darker and more dank; December has the fire of Christmas to keep it lit, but January and February are desolate. But he was right. The turning of the leaves is more interesting than their absence. The dwindling of the sunlight is more dramatic than the dark. Those attics, cellars, and closets hide more secrets than the woods.

Slow down your October. Enjoy it. Listen for the rain on the empty walks, and wonder where the October people are going.