Something Perfect This Way Comes (Patreon)

On the night Ray Bradbury died, I was performing at a large event in New York as part of Book Expo America (may she rest in peace). We’d all heard sometime not long before the authors went on stage, but no one had really had a chance to process or discuss it. The Emcee, Lev Grossman, introduced me, and when he first started to speak, I saw my publicist sit up very straight and make a note on her phone. I knew why. I’m not entirely a naive and idealistic poet. 

Because that night, when we were all rather in our feelings about it, Lev introduced me as “the Ray Bradbury of her generation,” a daunting phrase that has appeared on many of my book covers since. 

That sounds like a sneaky little brag, but I don’t say it to show off or even to say Lev was right, I really don’t, and I’m really not. I’m telling you the story because, until I finally, somehow, at the age of forty-five, came to read Something Wicked This Way Comes, I was deeply honored by the comparison but didn’t fully get the link between us.

I get it now.

I’d read plenty of Bradbury, don’t get me wrong. Science fiction is my world and he is rather a major deity in it. But while Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, even The Illustrated Man, (which I read at 15, plenty of time to be totally shaped by it), moved me, I never saw in them the kind of writer I wanted to be, or had become. I never felt particularly seen by those books, brilliant though they are.

But I get it now.

And having finished Something Wicked only a few weeks ago, I’m still not entirely okay. It’s such a book. It’s such a gorgeous wild creature of a book. The kind of book you hope you might produce one day, if you’re very lucky. If you’re very good. When your best self is on tap and all the stars are favorably aligned, when whatever is inside you that needs to make up fake people doing fake things to tell the truth about the world in any fashion decides to get its dancing shoes on.

It’s almost infuriating how beautiful it is. How very dare you, sir. How dare you peel off my skin and stick it on again inside-out; how dare you spin my soul completely around and then make me just walk through life like that for weeks? Who gave you permission to be this good, Ray from Waukegan? IT’S SO RUDE.

Is the novel itself completely perfect? Certainly not. Not one written is. Wicked has its flaws like everything. It’s a bit all over the place pacing-wise, and doesn’t care all that much about the plot or worldbuilding so much as the words and the feelings, the saying of them, the arousing of them in the reader. It’s all emotion, blindingly, almost pornographically sincere. Even the characters are pretty sketchy; they exist to feel for us, they exist in just strong enough strokes to contain their archetypes. Why the fuck does Charles Holloway talk like that? Like no one in the history of the world has ever talked? So astonishingly prettily that even the young characters have to ask why are you talking like this—and yet you never want him to stop talking like that. No one knows! Does it matter? Not really! And of course the ending is pretty abrupt (made much worse by the fact that my copy included so many essays and remarks on the book itself tha tI thought I had something like sixty-five pages to go when the story was suddenly just…over…and Beadbury was casually talking about Gene Kelly in the afterword) and not too interested in wrapping up all the loose ends so much as ending on the right tone. 

But those sins? Not fucking much in the way of literary sins, you know? And I felt so delighted personally because those are just about MY FAVORITE SINS and I do them all the time. I felt a kinship, a connection I hadn’t before. Sometimes there’s just too much feeling. Too much love. Too much autumn. The regular old way of writing a book can’t hold it all. Even on the sentence level, there’s tics and quirks that I’ve been doing my whole career, ways of constructing lines and scenes and shortcutting throughplots that often made me laugh out loud in recognition, despite having never read it before. I don’t know, it was like realizing you have your great-uncle’s eyes when you never thought you had anything in common before.

The only crime I can’t quite forgive, is leaving Miss Foley out to brutally dry after setting up how hellacious it is to ride the carousel and youthen the way she does…and then no one even checks up on her. BIT OF A ROUGH ONE, MISS F. SEE YOU MONDAY FOR FIFTH GRADE I GUESS? 

But really, it doesn’t matter, and if you know me or my work in any way, you should know how hard a book has to hit for me to shrug and auto-forgive its very few female characters getting punted into space. Hell, itt took about ten solid minutes to find the words to even finish that sentence because I don’t really want to turn any negative adjectives onto that lovely onyx of a novel.

Because none of that really matters to me at all. Something Wicked This Way Comes may have mild flaws as a novel, but every single sentence in it is perfect. Just perfect. Just phenomenally correct. Delivered by special post from wherever the best in us waits around finding busy work so it can postpone visiting as long as possible. 

When I posted about reading the book, someone replied “Ray Bradbury invented autumn” and I can almost believe it. SWTWC came out in 1962, when my father was as old as my son is now, only jus tleaving kindergarten, and pop culture was massively in flux. Wicked is the autumnal novel. I haven’t researched it exhaustively, and the idea of autumn as an aesthetic, as a feeling in and of itself, rather than merely a season or its most flamboyant holiday, is certainly not Bradbury’s alone by any stretch. But as an aesthetic that includes circuses despite circuses definititionally happening any time and mostly during the summer, had to be pretty young in 1962. When I’ve recommended it since, I’ve consistently “Haunted circus, but like…before everyone had done haunted circuses.”

And the funny thing is, Wicked is so much kinder than any other haunted circus story I’ve ever read. It’s so much more loving, so much more elegaic. I’m quite used to those stories going for the horror with a bit of calliope music and showman-patter for flavor. But Bradbury just cranks the music all the way up and makes the horror time itself rather than killer clowns or murdering magicians or the like. People loved this template and ran hard with it, but I’ve never read anything else that so precisely captured the why of carnival mono no aware. That circuses and carnivals come and go as cyclically as the seasons themselves, and thus connect the phases of our lives in a nexus of hypercolored experience: childhood, mortality, desire, and fear. Every time we hit the midway, we encounter again the younger versions of ourselves that have seen those same lights, smelled those same scents—but never the same way twice. Loss is part of time. We will see our children, or the children of others, experiencing that particular thrill in an immediate, uncomplicated way we never will again and neither will they, but only us and Charles know it. And we’ll love them for that innocence, and remember our own, and mourn both, and hold tighter to their excited little hands—and the horror of time so vividly demonstrating that it is passing and will continue to do so until even dust is dust is so much worse than the ringmaster actually being the devil or any final dance of gore.

I GET CARRIED AWAY BECAUSE IT’S SO GOOD.

But as I read this impossibly excellent book, something kept coming to mind that has nothing really whatever to do with literary technique or thematic resonance or reviewing/critiquing a work in any way.

Like any writer, I’ve spent a lot of time teaching—it does tend to pay rather more regularly and dependably than publishing. And many times over I’ve talked to a wide variety of students about the realities of being a working writer. That most people don’t have a clear idea of how much work it truly is, how all-consuming, how full of things which are highly necessary but not related to creativity much if at all, like proofreading and publicity and percentages and market trends. How much it stretches your brain to breaking to have to hold whole worlds and endless research and casts of dozens or hundreds in there, and everything they have to do to get where they’re going, while also not forgetting to hold on to the most basic tasks and responsibilities of every day life, everything you have to do to get where you’re going—hopefully with your family intact. 

But…it doesn’t always work out that way.

I’ve told many rooms the truth, that many people think a writer’s work day involves writing a brilliant line or two, then having a glass of chardonnay and then a pale, diaphanous curtain slowly flutters in the breeze while you stare dreamily at its shadow for several hours until it’s time for dinner and a paycheck. When, in fact, you might well only write one line on some days, but it took hours, it’s still not right, and now you feel crushingly, unredeemably behind on a book you must have longed to write at some point and very nearly still remember feeling that way. The writing life is actually just the anxiety life with an abnormally large paper trail, forgetting to take care of yourself in any way is basically normal, deadlines are actually capable of exponential reproduction, and the whole situation is essentially like being in graduate school all the time. 

And it’s always finals.

I’ve said that bit a lot over the years. 

And while I read Something Wicked This Way Comes, totally arrested again and again over these jeweled sentences that roll out with such impossible regularity and seeming ease, as though each one isn’t even really all that important because something else perfect is about to pounce on your face and another one after that, I kept thinking about that chardonnay line. It always gets a laugh. Anyone who’s tried to write or hoped to write or has successfully written or is adjacent to publishing at all doesn’t think that, but all those same people have encountered a cousin’s spouse or an airplane seat-neighbor or an uncle with some real specific feels about their high school English class who does think it often enough to chuckle.

I honestly hate chardonnay. It’s just the funniest wine to build the bit around.

But the thing is, over and over, I read lines in Wicked that made me think: if I wrote that line, on any given day? That might actually have been my workday. If I could knock off a line that good, I might actually feel like I’d done enough to deserve fucking off with a glass of something unchardonnay and pick up again tomorrow. Might feel like I had time and space to look at a fluttery shadow on a table for a minute. I might read over a line like that and feel okay about my output for that turn of the sundial.

Now, I don’t know anything specific about the writing of Something Wicked that isn’t in the Afterword. I don’t really know anything about Bradbury’s particular process. But I know it almost certainly didn’t happen like that. I know that some of those wonderful lines and speeches and moments came out as naturally as water flowing downhill. And I know some of them came out like ruptured appendixes. I know there probably wasn’t any day when he felt so satisfied with any one thing that he fucking watched some shadows for awhile and felt zen about everything. That book came out when Ray-Ray was 42. The giant fuzzy mascots of your 40s are Anxiety and Pressure, and you will NOT enjoy their dance stylings.

I know all that because that’s the real grind of writing and while everyone’s approach to making books is different, some things are just part of it, like bricks in a chimney or salt in the ocean or skeleton beat-boys flanking David S. Pumpkins. The ease with which a book reads has nothing to do with the ease of its writing. 

But god damn, it gives me freaking hope, this beautiful halloween pumpkin bomb of a story.

Because it did come out when Bradbury was 42. It wasn’t his HOT YOUNG STARMAKING DEBUT or and EAGERLY-AWAITED FOLLOWUP or the climactic volume in his LONG-RUNNING INFINITELY WORLDBUILT RICH MAN’S CAPTURE THE FLAG SERIES. It was just a new novel in an already mature career, written by someone in middle-age (and oh how it is a novel of middle-age, with all its nostalgia and perspective and sweet sadness) about the concerns of middle age, about something that clearly moved him and wasn’t just following any kind of market trend the way we are always counseled to do in order to stay relevant. 

And it’s this good, it’s this timeless, it’s this heartbreaking and real. Our world, and the world of entertainment is so hyperfocused on the young breakout wunderkind and the hot new trend, it feels almost optimistic to think that after 20 years I might still have something like this in me, that there might come a day where I write a line as good as some of these, and on that day, the idea that I might not be so fucking hard on myself as to take a guilt-free moment to enjoy life won’t be a nice little white lie.

Maybe all of us should be just a little less hard on ourselves. Sometimes it’s okay to have a glass of chardonnay (it’s not though) and be a little proud of a small good we made. Maybe it’s possible to not spend an entire youth feeling too old and old age feeling too young. 

But then, that’s part of the point Charles Halloway makes about the carousel. 

And I don’t mean to make this book all about myself in some weird narcissistic way, it’s just that really fantastic books do that to you. They break open your real life and shake everything inside up into a new shape, a new mess, a new order. You see yourself in the book and the book in yourself and you go on from the pages changed. That’s what we all kind of hope for when we open a new book, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

The carousel doesn’t stop turning, not for any of us, but maybe, just maybe, there’s a horse in there I haven’t written before still waiting for me—a horse the color of Halloween.

And maybe you do, too.