Something Wicked This Way Comes

What's that haunted tune whistling through the calliope? Find out with Ren Wednesday and Adam Whybray as they take a tour of Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Circus and explore the whirlingly evocative, if admittedly morally confusing world of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

We talk Dust Witches, balloon funerals and masculinity, in a rollickingly ghoulish episode filled with plenty of children's horror to get your panic-coloured teeth into.

A full transcript of this episode is available at: https://stillscared.podigee.io/28-somethingwicked

Beware the Autumn People

Today we talked about Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury from 1962, and touched on the film of the same name from 1983, directed by Jack Clayton.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is [email protected]. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at behance.net/lettydraws

Sound effects and music for this episode:

parabolix - bondage clown show

Pooleside - Calliope/file0227

Robot effect - John Esposo

GaryEdstrom - Merry Go Round

Mikey98 - Band organ/2010-11-01 093521

alienistcog - 2011-carnival-merry-go-round

tim.kahn - circus freak

Richard Wroblewski - circus-normal

Chopin's 'Funeral March' backwards (uploaded by Cosmic Ferret)

Transcript

Ren: Good evening, Adam!

Adam: Ahoy hoy hoy!

Ren: Today we’re talking about Something Wicked This Way Comes, by the thinking man’s R.L. Stein, Ray Bradbrury!

Adam: I’m familiar with his works.

Ren: This novel is from 1962, and described as ‘dark fantasy’. We’ll touch on the film as well, from 1983, but —

Adam: Oh, it’s a brown film.

Ren: It’s a very brown film, to be honest. It’s disappointingly lacking in spectacle and scandal.

Adam: And spirit.

Ren: And spirit, yeah.

Adam: Which is a shame because knowing that it was 1980s Disney children’s horror, I think I was expecting something in the region of Return to Oz, and I’d heard of it spoken of in the same breath as Return to Oz, but this has no sassy Belinda the chicken, or Mumbi heads or any of that kind of stuff.

Ren: They must have spent all their budget on Return to Oz…

Adam: And probably protecting themselves from being sued by MGM. But we’ll get onto that, let’s talk about the book.

Ren: So our protagonists are 13 year-old neighbours Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, who live in a town called Greentown, in Illinois. It’s the week before Halloween and a travelling carnival comes to their town by night.

It comes in at 3am on a train, and the wind whistles through the pipes of the calliope, which is a kind of steam-powered organ traditionally used in circuses.

Adam: Ah, I’m glad you looked that up because it’s a word I assumed I should already know, and so out of stubborn pride didn’t look it up. So thanks for that!

Ren: I didn’t know how to pronounce it either, so I thought I’d better do my research on that one. To spoil it right at the start, we’re just going to get right in there —

Adam: This ain’t your mama’s carnival!!

Ren: Yeah, it turns out that Cooger and Dark’s carnival has been coming to this town for over 100 years, extending the lives of the carnival proprietors by ghastly means, and sucking new people from each generation into the (spooky echoey sound effect) parade of damned souls.

Adam: Basically, have you seen Twin Peaks?

Ren: No…

Adam: So, the denizens of the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks all eat this porridge-like substance called Garmonbozia (Clip from Twin Peaks of people chanting ‘Garmonbozia’) which is basically fear and suffering in porridge form.

Ren: Okay.

Adam: It’s green and goopy, a sort of sickly yellow-green. Basically the carnival people in this feed off Garmonbozia.

Ren: It’s also a very masculine novel.

Adam: Yes it is!

Ren: It’s about fathers and sons, and boys and men. And the central relationships are that between the two boys, and between Will and his father, Charles.

Adam: The beautiful, irascible spirit of young boys! Stealing apples and smashing windows and all the great things of childhood.

Ren: Ah, to be young and wear short trousers!

Adam: Kicking squirrels in the park and setting old people alight! All of it! High japes.

Ren: How did you come across this?

Adam: Oh gosh, that’s a good point, I did chose it. I don’t know! I mean obviously the phrase ‘something wicked this way comes is from Macbeth’ and in year 7 I was a witch in Macbeth.

Ren: Oh nice.

Adam: So I has to learn those lines ‘Hubble bubble toil and trouble’, and I don’t know, maybe I looked those lines up online?

I feel like I’ve just been aware for a long time that there’s a children’s novel called Something Wicked This Way Comes, long before I knew it was by Ray Bradbury or anything about it, and then the film probably came up when I was researching for this podcast.

I feel like it’s been bubbling in my subconscious for a long time. I think I was definitely aware of it as a kid.

Ren: I wasn’t aware of it until you mentioned it…

Adam: Well, I hadn’t read it or watched it, so this was the first time reading and watching it for both of us. I’d only read some Bradbury short stories before.

Ren: Yeah, likewise. Although I do think about them quite often. There’s one in particular about an automated house that talks to you —

Adam: — Oh yeah, is that There Will Come Soft Rains? Like, after an apocalypse the house still stands, going through its ritualistic cycles?

Ren: It might be that one! I know he’s done a few on that theme. But I remember particularly the oven that says (echoey sound effect) ‘I’m apple pie and I’m done!’

Adam: Why do you make it sound so smug!?

Ren: I just imagined it smug.

Adam: That does sound like a Bradbury line ‘with apple-pie smugness’

Ren: ‘Apple-pie smugness’, that’s great. But yes, those stories seem increasingly more relevant with smart home devices and so on.

Adam: Yes, that’s true. Sadly this story isn’t increasingly more appropriate, there hasn’t been some great rise in evil carnivals, sadly.

Ren: Sadly.

Adam: However much the people dressing up as evil clowns around halloween may wish there were, it’s just pipe dreams really. Organ pipe dreams.

Ren: So I had an idea that for discussing this novel that we’ll pretend we’re at the carnival and walk around our imaginary carnival and go to one side-show or aspect at a time, and talk about the bits of the novel associated with that.

Adam: Oh that sounds great! I want to go to the carnival!

Ren: Yes, let’s go to the carnival, Adam.

(Clip, someone speaking in a vaguely Slavic accent, with carnival sounds in the background: Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, it has arrived, come to the dark circus! The circus where clowns never smile, your darkest nightmares will come to life!)

Adam: (Piping small child voice) Oh Ren, there aren’t many vegetarian food stalls! I’m going to have to have corn on the cob again!

Ren: Candyfloss Adam! The pure vegetarian food stuff!

Adam: I can smell the hot dogs in the air, it’s making me feel a bit nauseous actually. I shouldn’t have gone on those waltzers.

Ren: Yes, well. We’ll distract you from that with a visit to the Hall of Mirrors!

Adam: Oh, are you sure… okay, I guess I’ll do it. It’s been a long time and I found it quite anxiety provoking.

Ren: I’m sure these ones are fine!

Adam: (sceptical) Yeah, I’m sure it’s fine….

Ren: So apart from the carnival arriving at 3am, and the wind playing spooky music on the calliope, the first spooky thing that the boys encounter is the Hall of Mirrors.

On the first day at the carnival they see their teacher, Miss Foley, trapped in the mirror maze. They pull her out and she’s frightened and babbling and says she saw a lost girl in there who looked a lot like her as a child, but then she pulls herself together and says ‘oh, it’s fine boys’ and off she goes.

But that’s our first creepy instance. In the film, people seem to see themselves in the mirrors how they wish to be. For example there’s a man missing an arm and a leg and he sees himself with all his limbs, but I don’t think we have that in the book.

Adam: No, there’s a slight hint that people are drawn into the mirror maze through desire, basically, whether it’s desire to be younger or maybe a desire to be rich? The book’s a lot more elusive than the film.

Why the film doesn’t really work is that it’s kind of deadeningly literal? Bradbury’s got this amazing colourful, poetic, adjective-heavy writing style which just feels completely steamrollered by the film.

It’s very odd and imagistic, and the film really does not capture that at all, for me.

Ren: No. The writing in the book feels feverish and whirling —

Adam: — absolutely, you can only capture it out of the corner of your eye. I enjoyed it the most when I was just letting it flow over and not even necessarily trying to grab all the literal images.

It uses imagery and metaphor in this very loose way. There’s a bit later where it describes ‘faces the colour of beds’

(Both laugh)

What the - what?! I know there was that lyric by your favourite band Keane, ‘bed-shaped your limbs of stone’… maybe a face like a bed? But what’s the colour — you don’t get a paint sample ‘the colour of bed’.

I don’t know about that line, but a lot of it makes this kind of feverish intuitive sense that you can’t look at too straight on or else it seems to disintegrate.

Ren: There’s definitely the suggestion in the book that there’s something both mesmerising and horrifying in the mirror maze. It’s not obvious what they actually see. Jim wanders in, and Will follows him and it says

‘Jim was there half in and half out of the cold glass tides, like someone abandoned on a seashore, when a close friend has gone far out and there is wonder if he will ever come back. Jim stood as if he had not moved so much as an eyelash in five minutes, staring, his mouth half-open, waiting for the next wave to come in and show him more’.

Adam: So Jim’s a bit of a bad boy. He desperately wants to grow up and be older. There’s this passage early on in the novel, in which Jim takes Will out to spy on, I guess people having sex in a bedroom in a house, right? He’s a little voyeur?

And Will’s like, ‘Oh I don’t know Jim’ but Jim’s like ‘nah, nah, come on!’

Ren: ‘Just one more time!’

Adam: Yeah! And Will’s quite troubled by it and doesn’t want to. They play that out a bit differently in the film, instead it’s an exotic dance display in one of the tents that they’re caught peeping at.

But you get the sense that Will is quite happy in his boyhood games and feeling safe and cosy in the innocence of childhood, whereas Jim has this darker edge to him, where he wants the experience of adulthood. He desperately wants the things that are whispered about behind closed doors, and he wants to know about them sooner rather than later.

Ren: As we’re talking about that, shall we leave the Hall of Mirrors and take a stroll over to the carousel? (Carnival music comes in)

Adam: Yes, but which way is it turning? Clockwise or anti-clockwise?

Ren: Oooh.

Adam: How do you feel about carousels? Do you like them?

Ren: Uhh, yes… but I do get very easily motion sick so it’s a bit of a love-hate relationship.

Adam: Yeah, as a kid there was one at the steam museum that I was really scared of, because it had a dragon. But I find it quite disturbing how it often looks like the horses are trying to bolt. They tend to look spooked, the horse expressions have a state of terror which I find quite odd and disturbing.

I remember going on one in France as a kid, and I think this is a European tradition of having a toy or piñata hanging down, and the kids having to try and grab it as they go around. I think I might have seen it once in this country, but it’s not so much of a thing here. It livened it up. It’s quite dangerous, of course. There’s the risk you might tumble off the horse. All the fun of the fair!

Ren: So this carnival carousel is an important thing in the novel, because it becomes one of the central motifs in the novel that represents the characters anxieties and desires about age, and growing up and ageing.

On the first day of the carnival, the boys find the carousel with a sign that says ‘Out of Order! Keep Off!’. And is described, when we first encounter it:

‘Its horses, goats, antelopes, zebras, speared through their spines with brass javelins, hung contorted as in a death rictus, asking mercy with their fright-coloured eyes, seeking revenge with their panic-coloured teeth’

So, you know, a regular happy, friendly carousel.

Adam: For the kids!

Ren: Panic-coloured teeth.

Adam: That’s the thing, that doesn’t mean anything but it feels like it means something.

This character called Mr Cooger is quite thinly sketched compared to Mr Dark, but he’s the co-owner of the carnival and yet we don’t learn that much about him except that he likes to change his age. So he rides this carousel backwards, and for every rotation he goes back another year. Can I read the description of him on the carousel?

‘It was Jim who first noticed the new thing happening, for he kicked Will, once, Will looked over, and Jim nodded frantically at the man in the machine as he came around the next time.

Mr Cooger's face was melting like pink wax.

His hands were becoming doll's hands.

His bones sank away beneath his clothes; his clothes then shrank down to fit his dwindling frame.

His face flickered going, and each time around he melted more.

Will saw Jim's head shift, circling.

The carousel wheeled, a great back-drifting lunar dream the horses thrusting, the music ingasped after, while Mr Cooger, as simple as shadows, as simple as light, as simple as time, got younger.And younger.And younger.

Each time he wheeled to view he sat alone with his bones, which shaped like warm candles burning away to tender years.’

I don’t know why it makes him look waxy, but I quite like that it does!

Ren: It’s definitely evocative, if not quite explicable.

Adam: I think that generally can be said of the whole book!

Ren: So Mr Cooger steps off the carousel as a 12 year-old boy, and he then poses as the teacher, Miss Foley’s nephew.

Adam: The teacher who seemingly has a constant torrent of rain in her house. Now, I worked out from the film that this was referring to the beads hanging down over the door frame. But in the book, I thought this was all part of the magical fantasy, ‘Oh, she’s got a rain room, sure’.

Ren: ‘Why not?’ So she’s one of our two female characters.

Adam: In the book does Jim have a mother? Oh, the witch, I suppose.

Ren: And I suppose Will has a mother. And perhaps Jim has a mother somewhere.

Adam: But all mothers do in this book, and to an extent in the film is ‘prevent boys from having fun’. That’s basically their role. To embody goodness, but of a very boring variety.

Ren: And be a bit gossipy.

Adam: Oh yeah, there’s a passage where Bradbury really shows gossip what for, he really hates gossip!

Ren: Gossip is part of the whole circus of the damned… rigmarole.

Adam: It’s very odd because Bradbury seems very sure of his morality in tis book, even though it’s very confusingly defined. What is good and what is evil sometimes seems quite arbitrary. ‘I know it when I see it’ kind of thing.

So the nephew, sorry.

Ren: Yeah, the nephew. Who is one of the more effective parts of the film, he is quite creepy.

Adam: I agree the casting was good. He’s just quite expressionless, the kid.

Ren: He tries to frame Jim and Will by taking Miss Foley’s jewellery and throwing it out on the lawn where they are and shouting ‘police, police!’. And then he runs off to the carnival again, and Jim and Will follow him.

Then the nephew jumps on the carousel, so he can go back to being a man of 40 and say ’No, I didn’t do anything’.

But Jim jumps on the carousel, because he’s determined to be 18, to get a few more years on him. They grapple with the controls until they break and the carousel begins to spin out of control, sending the nephew/Mr Cooger round and round, rotating and rotating, until eventually the switch box blows.

And I’m just going to read the description of what happens to Mr Cooger when the carousel’s finally stopped and they walk up:

‘They walked slowly to the merry-go-round, their shoes whispering.
The shadowy figure lay on the near side, on the plank floor, its face turned away.
One hand hung off the platform.
It did not belong to a boy.
It seemed a huge wax hand shrivelled 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, not ninety, not one hundred, no, not one hundred ten, but one hundred twenty or one hundred thirty impossible years old’.

Ahhhh! Such horror!

Adam: I mean, what it made me think of is Shrinkles. You remember Shrinkles?

Ren: No…

Adam: You put them in the oven and they shrink! Shrinkles!

Ren: Ohh, yes, okay.

Adam: They’re made of a strange kind of plastic, and you draw a design on them and then put them in the oven and it would shrink down and be a keyring or something.

A similar fate happens to the illustrated man, and all of his tattoos are described as getting smaller, and I imagined them as being like Shrinkles.

Ren: What this reminded me of was the Indiana Jones film when the villain drinks from the wrong grail and ages instantly. Which I found quite frightening!

Adam: Same here. There’s a similar effect in the film of Something Wicked, but it’s a little bit ropey, to be honest. It does look like the kind of mannequin you’d get in a third or fourth rate ghost train.

Ren: I’m sorry this carnival has no ghost train, Adam!

Adam: That’s true! It’s okay though, I went on a ghost train just last Christmas. First I went on this ride that I thought was going to be a ghost train, and it was actually a VR ride. It was called something like ‘Dr Flibbertigibbet’s Stupendous Adventures Through Time!’, and you had to go on the ride with your VR helmet. It probably used to be a ghost train but that wasn’t ‘cool’ enough for the kids, and they upgraded it.

It whisked you through history, but obviously it was trying to do quite a complicated narrative, in a four or five minute ride. And there was a whole plot about time being sabotaged, and so forth. But obviously you only have the length of time that the track of the former ghost train would allow, so you spent 5 seconds, maybe 10 in each time period. It was very confusing and overwhelming!

‘Oh, Mayan civilzation! Oh, we’re in the future! Oh, we’re in a place with giant toadstool mushrooms!’ It was quite hard to make head or tail of, to be honest.

But I do love ghost trains, and I always say that if I won the lottery I would philanthropically spend it on a really amazing ghost train. So I could design my own monsters, and get people to construct them for me. Oh, and sorting out climate change as well. If the ghost train could also do that, somehow, that would be the ideal.

Ren: So Mr Cooger now assumes a new role as ‘Mr Electrico’. The other circus people move him into an electric chair and keep him alive by electricity.

Adam: I mean he sounds like one of the X-Men. But it’s a bit more ghoulish than that.

Ren: We’ll come back to Mr Electrico, but he’s kept in that state for a good chunk of the novel, the rest of the novel really.*

Adam: Maybe that’s why we don’t get to know him as well as Mr Dark, because apart from being electrocuted he doesn’t get to do very much.

Ren: It takes them a long while to get the carousel working again.

Adam: It does seem a bit unreasonable, this is Mr Dark’s business partner, you might expect that if you were horribly aged, your business partner might lay you up in bed or something. Not like, ‘right mate, I’m going to strap you to a chair and electrocute you —

Ren: For entertainment.

Adam: ‘Thanks business partner, great’.

Ren: Well, I guess Mr Dark is part of the show because he’s the Illustrated Man, so maybe Mr Cooger should do his part as well.

Adam: That is a fair point, Mr Cooger can’t be all business. I take it back, that’s fair.

Talking about getting suddenly older, this is reflected appropriately in the film by the child actor suddenly getting noticeably older in certain scenes!

Ren: Yeah?!

Adam: Yeah, yeah! I saw this on Wikipedia, but you can really tell. Basically Disney wasn’t happy with the original cut, they decided that some bits were too scary, which might be why it feels a bit tepid, because they cut out the scary bits.

Then they re-shot certain scenes, so the scene in the film that’s not in the book with all the spiders, the kids are about two years older, just suddenly. And part of me is like ‘that’s shoddy’ and part of me is like (lecturer voice) ‘Hmmm, a very clever embodiment of one of the book’s central themes’

Ren: I guess maybe that was the discussion they had: ‘is this too shoddy?’ ‘No, actually! —

Adam: ’It’s very clever’

Ren: ‘We are very clever’.

The carousel must get working again, because they meet a little girl crying by the side of the road and then realise that she’s their teacher, Miss Foley. But another aspect of the horror is that she wished to be young again, but in reality that’s left her out of time and place, because no-one believes who she is, and she doesn’t have anywhere to go.

Adam: And as is pointed out by Will’s father in the book, does she still have the brain of an adult? In what way is she young? Does she just look younger, or is she younger in health? What kind of transformation is this?

Ren: We don’t really know what the terms of this deal are.

Adam: Well, I think part of the message of the novel is that you can’t go home again. Enjoy and be good in the present because you can’t re-live your lost opportunities.

Ren: We get this in the figure of Will’s father, Charles Halloway, who feels insecure about his position as a father because he was quite old when Will was born, so he’s in his ‘50s and thinks ‘I’m too old to play baseball with him’ —

Adam: — And what kind of American dad are if you don’t play baseball with your son??

Ren: So Mr Dark tries to get him find the boys by offering him youth, and preying on this insecurity, but Charles doesn’t help him.

This is later on in the book, but because obviously Mr Dark isn’t very happy with Jim and Will for ageing his business partner so drastically, so towards the end of the book he goes prowling through the town trying to find them.

Adam: I think he’s also concerned that they’re going to spread the word, ‘you know that carnival that seems obviously and explicitly evil? It’s obviously and explicitly evil!’ ‘My word!’

Ren: ‘What, Cooger and Dark’s pandemonium carnival??’

Adam: ‘You mean that carnival that goes through the streets playing evil organ music? — ’

Ren: ‘ — at 3am? Why I never!’ But Mr Dark ends up prowling through the library looking for the boys who are hiding in the bookcase, and he taunts Will with a particularly horrible story about his mother (which turns out to not be true), but he says that they left her on the merry-go-round going forward, like they did to Mr Cooger:

‘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’

shudder

Adam: That’s really good. Is that your Texture of the Week?

Ren: It’s not actually!

Adam: Shall we do it? I feel like we’ve been leaving them right to the end and I think we should (organ squeeze)

(Organ squeezing and singing) Texture of the Week!

Ren: Very good.

Adam: So that’s not your Texture of the Week?

Ren: No, there’s so many options!

Adam: There is a cornucopia of textures!

Ren: But I think the one I’m going to go for —

Adam: — It’ll be really funny if we get the same one now.

Ren: I’ve picked a few options just in case. We haven’t talked about her yet, but the Dust Witch goes out to find Jim and Will and she leaves a track on Jim’s house so the rest of the carnival can find him:

‘It was a track like a snail paints on a sidewalk. It glistened. It was silver-slick. But this was a path left by a gigantic snail, that if existed at all, weighed a hundred pounds. The silver ribbon was a yard across. Staring down at the leaf-filled rain trough, the silver track shimmered to the rooftop, then tremored down the other side’

Mmm, slimy.

Adam: I did think of that one as well, but I went for the first description of the circus balloon that the witch uses, so this is when the carnival first pulls into town in the middle of the night:

‘The ringmaster stood in the middle of the land. The balloon like a vast moldy green cheese stood fixed to the sky. Then - darkness came.
The last thing Will saw was the balloon swooping down, as clouds covered the moon. In the night he felt the men rush to unseen tasks. He sense the balloon, like a great fat spider, fiddling with the lines and poles, rearing a tapestry in the sky’.

Alone, they’re very simple descriptions, but I really like the balloon being at once both a big mouldy cheese and a fat spider. I think layering those images on top of one another is quite delicious, and horrible.

Ren: I did want to give a special mention to ‘ulmers’ and ‘goffs’ - did you notice this bit? They’re the different creatures that populate Will and Jim’s dreams. One of them has ulmers and one of them has goffs.

Adam: Like all 1980s and listening to Bauhaus and Robert Smith.

One of the other things I liked about the balloon was that it was given a balloon funeral, aww. All balloons when they burst should be given a balloon funeral!

Ren: In a very, very long balloon coffin!

Adam: I thought that was very charming.

So what rides await us? Do we have any more?

Ren: Yeah… I think we’re heading to the sideshows now, the tents and the people who populate them.

Adam: You’ve already mentioned the Witch.

Ren: Yeah, the Dust Witch.

Adam: Is she the same as the fortune teller? I got a bit confused.

Ren: I don’t think so… I think they’re listed separately on the playbill.

The Witch is blind, but she can smell and taste souls? She floats down on the balloon and marks Jim’s house, so Will goes after her and ends up throwing an arrowhead at the balloon and sends her spiralling off, although not dead.

And she reappears when Mr Dark captures the boys in the library. It describes:

‘her seamed black wax sewn-shut iguana eyelids and her great proboscis with the nostrils caked like tobacco-blackened pipe bowls’

That’s a bit of a tongue-twister. We’re reading quite a lot of extracts from this one, but I think it deserves it.

Adam: Yes, absolutely. The plot is fairly flimsy but it is really all about the images.

Ren: Do you want to read the part where she turns the boys into wax puppets?

Adam: Well, I have one more part I want to read, so you read it and I’ll see if I can find the other part.

Ren:

‘Darning-needle dragonfly, sew up these mouths so they not speak!’

Touch, sew, touch, sew her thumbnail stabbed, punched, drew, stabbed, punched, drew along their lower, upper lips until they were, thread-pouch shut with invisible thread.

‘Darning needle-dragonfly, sew up these ears, so they not hear!’

Cold sand funnelled Will's ears, burying her voice. Muffled, far away, fading, she chanted on with a rustle, tick, tickle, tap, flourish of calliper hands.

Moss grew in Jim's ears, swiftly sealing him deep.

‘Darning needle-dragonfly, sew up these eyes so they not see!’

Her white-hot fingerprints rolled back their stricken eyeballs to throw the lids down with bangs like great tin doors slammed shut.

Will saw a billion flashbulbs explode, then suck to darkness while the unseen darning-needle insect out beyond somewhere pranced and fizzed like insect drawn to sun-warmed honeypot, as closeted voice stitched off their senses forever and a day beyond.’

It’s so good to read aloud!

Adam: It really trips off the tongue, the sound of the words and the texture of the words more than their meaning.

I think this is probably why it’s very hard to make into a film. I think really it needed to be animated, because animation has that fluidity of form and that inherent freedom that is harder to get in live action.

Jack Clayton, however much I like him as a director, is a very odd choice? Have you seen any other Clayton films?

Ren: I’m not sure, what has he done?

Adam: He directed most famously A Room at the Top, which is a notable 1960s British kitchen-sink drama. So mostly known for social realism and then later thrillers. Really not someone you’d imagine to pick for this project.

Certainly not a bad director, but he has a very straightforward visual style, basically. Whereas this needs something far more phantasmagoric. I’d love to see if a young Tim Burton, Tim Burton of Beetlejuice, had directed this. Because I just feel like it needs weird bits of stop-motion.

And obviously they were long dead by the time this film was released, but even the Fleischer brothers, who did Betty Boop. Because if you watch their animations, everything is in a constant state of flux and transformation. Faces that balloon out and rattle-bones skeletons. And I think what really makes the novel is that abstraction and how the language seems to squirm and move and wriggle about on the page.

Because the themes of the novel don’t appeal to me nearly as much. Because this is a novel about masculinity, essentially, and I guess the importance of certain masculine virtues.

I found it quite distressing that the point at which Will’s previously quite gentle and bookish father steps up to the plate, is the point where he repeatedly hits his son! And I know he’s meant to be shaking him out of his complacency to save Jim, but I found it quite disturbing that his heroic moment as a father is him hitting his son repeatedly round the head!

Ren: And firing a rifle to kill the Dust Witch.

Adam: I guess I quite liked Will’s father and it seemed a shame that for him to be redeemed he had to become this man of action.

Did you have any other thoughts about the book’s handling of masculinity, or indeed, the mothers and femininity?

Ren: Well, I mean it’s not a very inspiring portfolio of roles for the women. We have the mothers who, as you said, are there to stop the boys having fun, we have the elderly spinster school teacher and we have the Witch. Some pretty unreconstructed tropes there, really.

Adam: And I can enjoy things that focus on relationships between fathers and sons — as you know I’m a big fan of, certainly the first few seasons of King of the Hill. And I really love the stuff that focuses on the relationship between Hank and Bobby.

It comes from quite a conservative place, but it does at least problematise it a bit, and the bits that are the most touching is where they meet in the middle and Hank appreciates Bobby’s more feminine aspects and his performativity, and the fact that he’s not like Hank.

And you have the extraordinary character of Peggy and I feel like it’s a shame as King of the Hill goes on — sorry this is a completely different topic! — she gets punished or shamed more, and I think the show is at its best when a real joy is taken in Peggy’s character.

What I’m saying is that I’m not against films or books that focus on masculinity, but I think set against the freedom of the language and how inspiring that is, it seemed sadly very traditionalist and conservative in its ideology in a way that feels at odds with the style.

Ren: Yeah, I think that’s it. It does feel a bit like two separate books, in a way.

Adam: It’s tricky in a way, because maybe why I like Philip Ridley, say, is that for good or for ill I feel like there’s a genuine degree of deviance which gives it a frisson, right?

Ridley is sort of on the side of misrule and chaos. And it’s odd that Bradbury has so much ability to conjure up these phantasmagoric spectacles, but at the end they’re just relegated to freaks who are rightfully cast out into the darkness at the end of the book.

Ren: Yeah, because he’s got the gift of the grotesque and the bizarre. Incredible descriptions. But then it’s like ‘Well that’s all wrong and deviant, the end’.

Adam: That is what the end feels like. It’s quite an abrupt end, as well. I don’t know, I guess I’m a big fan of The Residents and most of The Residents 50-odd years of music recording is about trying to explore the beauties and deviance, when it’s wrong and when it’s not wrong.

Being able to see where ugliness and beauty intersect, and exploring that in a way that feels quite exciting. Which is sometimes quite problematic in its own terms, but in a way that I find interesting, and I feel like it’s almost like Bradbury is undercutting his own impulse, maybe.

It feels quite invested in the transgressive elements, and then yet at a certain point the toys have to be put back in the box, and the box has to be hammered shut.

Ren: And we have to go back to being boys, and men.

Adam: On one level I was touched by the fact that the book seems very invested in goodness and decency, but when at the end of the book this goodness and decency gets tied up with shooting shotguns and dispelling freaks and hitting your son, I just found that quite disappointing, I guess.

Ren: Well, as we’re sort of there anyway, we should probably talk about the freak show, and the freaks of the carnival. Not a progressive take on the freak show. The freaks are just referred to as that mostly, just plural and anonymous.

Adam: Yes, they’re only individualised in the most cursory of ways.

Ren: Just listed by their stage names: ‘the lava drinker’, ‘the skeleton’, ‘the dangling man’. And then we have the dwarf, who starts the story as the man who sells lightening rods, but who’s then taken by the carnival and squashed into a small form, and his sanity taken.

Will’s father has this passage speculating that the freaks are sinners, ‘sinners who’ve travelled so long, hoping for deliverance that they’ve taken on the shape of their original sins? The Fat Man, what was he once? If I can guess the carnival’s sense of irony, the way they like to weight the scales, he was once a ravener of all kinds and varieties of lust. No matter, there he lives now, anyway, collected up in his bursting skin’

So, it’s the idea that the carnival is dishing out Dante’s inferno-style punishments while the sinners are still alive.

Adam: And it’s very much that the dwarf’s physical smallness is an embodiment of his moral smallness. It’s a very tired trope. In my least favourite Werner Herzog film Even Dwarfs Started Small he uses it there, and it’s just such a Victorian, wrong-headed idea.

And lazy as well! It’s partly the allegorical laziness of it that frustrates me, because I feel like the book’s rich enough that it didn’t need to do that. I don’t think that really adds anything to it.

And I can see why people have a fascination with freak shows, and I think they can be handled in a better way. Maybe it’s never going to be free of a certain queasiness or a certain whiff of exploitation, but say The Residents Freak Show album, at least has songs dedicated to these different characters and goes into their backstories, and we have a sense of them as people with loves and heartache and loss.

Yes, it is a little bit voyeuristic and carnivalesque, but like the film Freaks, say, not a perfect film but it does seem to be invested in the humanity of these performers, which we don’t get from this.

Ren: And Freaks is a very old film, so it’s not like this book was written before people were considering ideas like this, because Freaks had some aspect of this in the ’20s.

Adam: I think late ‘20s or early ‘30s. So that’s disappointing, I think they are there as flavour text, really. But as I say, I think what saves the novel is its language use and abstraction, and is at its worst when it’s being very literal-minded and heavily allegorical, and sadly the film mostly occupies a very literal position, so it only captures the least good aspects of the book.

Apart from some good performances.

Ren: I mean, I always like Jonathan Pryce.

Adam: I know you’re a big fan of Brazil. And he does make a splendidly sinister and hate-filled Mr Dark, striding about wickedly.

(Clip of Jonathan Pryce as Mr Dark from the film, taunting Mr Halloway and saying he can make him young again:

‘Your books cannot hurt me, old man. Yes, old. Because your heart is old. Listen to it.

You tell me where the boys are hiding. and I can make you young again. I could turn your years back for you to… …let's say, 30? Now speak, or you've missed it.

Going… it's gone. 31, 32. 32? Year of a man's prime. Loved by many women. You might still learn to swim. 32? Going… Gone.

33, 34. 35? Oh, 35. Time to father a family, build a fortune. 35! A year when you could run up the the stairs without panting for breath. 35… gone. 36? 37?

Where are they? 38… Hear your heart, hear my count. Still young, 39, 39. A fine year, still young. 39… gone.

Oh, oh! 40, and you’re old! Your old heart!

Will (shouting): No, no Dad, don’t listen!’)

Ren: Adam do you have a Claim of the Week?

Adam: (Muffled announcer voice) Claim of the Week!

Yes, I do. Do you?

Ren: I do! We’re doing this now.

Adam: We’re doing this now, claim of the week has been buoyed up by its own gaseous self-belief into a regular instalment.

So my Claim of the Week is when Charles Halloway, i.e. Will’s dad, explains who the Autumn people are, who are Mr Dark and his cronies, basically.

So Charles Halloway describes the Autumn people like this: (Adam reads this with the melodramatic flourish it deserves, with sound effects distorting the voice to more portentous heights as it continues)

‘For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer.

For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm.

What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners.

They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles - breaks.

(Normal voice)

Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.’

Ren: Oh Charlie, buddy!

Adam: It sounds like a bit of guesswork’s going on here! ‘What ticks in their head, I dunno, worms!!’

Ren: That’s a bit Poe, that is.

Adam: It is a bit Poe! He’s gone into full on preacher-man mode.

Ren: He does do a fair bit of monologuing in this book.

My one is also Charles Halloway.

Adam: He’s a claim making fellow!

Ren: He’s a claim making man. My one is when Mr Dark tattoos on his palms the faces of Jim and Will, and goes around and shows them to Charles, and says ‘who are these boys?’ And Charles goes, ‘oh, well, that one is ‘Milton Blumquist’ and the other one is ‘Avery Johnson’ and they’ve both just moved to Milwaukee.’

Adam: It’s a good bit of improv.

Ren: Milton Blumquist.

Adam: I have to say before we finish, in defence of the film, I thought the parade scene was pretty good. It would have been better animated, and with some gloopy stop-motion, but Pryce was quite sinister, and I liked them hiding below the street and looking up through the grate.

(Clip from the film: Sombre parade music, including miscellaneous animal noises. Charles Halloway says: ‘What the hell’s going on?’ And then ‘Come to the library at night’)

Have you got any other thoughts?

Ren: I think, I am out of thoughts! I think I have said all my thoughts.

Adam: Well. Thoughts exhausted!

Ren: Actually we haven’t mentioned how they beat back the carnival.

Adam: Oh, that’s cause I didn’t really understand it, to be honest! In the film there’s just lots of lights and lasers or something.

Ren: Well, Charles Halloway works out that you have to laugh at them, and that kills them.

Adam: It’s like the evil kitchen sponge in Goosebumps.

Ren: Exactly, yes. You have to laugh at the evil sponge, and the evil witch.

Adam: You’re obviously right, but there’s a bit earlier where Charles says you should be suspicious of people who are laughing too much because they’re probably evil!

There’s a bit where Will’s like, ‘Oh does that mean that good people are happy?’ And Charles is like, ‘No, no quite the opposite, the happiest people are probably happy because they’ve done lots of terrible stuff, so if you see someone too happy they’re a wrong ‘un’

Ren: Well that’s a mixed message.

Adam: So maybe you’ve got to be not really happy, but then pretend to be happy when you’re faced with the evil people, and if you pretend really hard then you become happy. In this manic, weird way which becomes quite violent.

Ren: Good, I’m glad we’ve sorted that out.

Adam: Come for the language, stay for the confused messages. I’m sure there’s some wisdom between its pages, but mostly it’s just ghoulish fun, really.

Ren: Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam: By the pricking of my thumbs, leave us a review, our creepy chums!

Ren: See you next time spooky kids!

Adam: Bye!

Ren: Bye!

Sorry, coming back to Mr Electrico didn’t make it into the edit! Essentially, he crumbles into dust at the end of the book when the carnival folk drop him while trying to take him back to the carousel. So long, Mr Electrico.