While the spooky travelling circus perhaps wasn’t a well-worn trope of horror fiction and drama when Bradbury’s novel was first published, Mr Dark is from a classic mould. He is “tall as a lamp-post” and “his pale face, lunar pockmarks denting it, cast light on those who stood below”. Half Dracula, half ringmaster, “his vest was the colour of fresh blood. His eyebrows, his hair, his suit were liquorice black”.
Mr Dark of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has an intent as old and simple as his melodramatic black-hat appearance: he wants souls to power the furnace of his infernal travelling carnival, and individuals to populate the shadowy, freak-haunted tents that line the midway of wherever the carny fetches up.
Dark is one of those villains who does what he does because he has to, and what he does is heinous and horrible. But he is not simply giving in to his natural urges and surviving: the dark heart of Dark’s villainy is that he knows his deeds are evil, and he plays up to this – relishes it. Why else the cheap theatre of the ringmaster’s costume, the body carved with hypnotically moving tattoos acting out temptations and passion plays? Dark – we never learn his full name, merely his initials, “GM”, and the name “Jed”, which he uses when magically transformed into a sinister boy, or his alter-ego The Illustrated Man – embraces his role of villain, and is all the more frightening for it.
Like Satan, whom Dark could be but probably isn’t, he deals in temptation. In return for the immortal souls he needs to fuel his carnival, he offers his victims their hearts’ desires. Thus the ageing teacher Miss Foley is allowed to ride the merry-go-round, but backwards, the Funeral March playing in reverse on the wheezing calliope as it takes a year off with every revolution until she is a young girl again. Thus Tom Fury, the lightning-rod seller, who has spent his life selling lightning rods and leaving others to face the storms, is squashed and compacted to the size of a small boy.
For there is the second strand to Dark’s villainy: beware what you wish for. Those who accept his bargains invariably end up twisted or abandoned; perhaps, like Miss Foley, young in appearance, but with the mind or an old lady, or, like Tom Fury, shrunk “not to a boy but a mean ball of grotesque tripes, all self-involved”. Thus does Dark populate his sideshows … the Pinhead, the Dust Witch, the Fire-Eater were all once ordinary folk who signed the covenant and found themselves stranded in Dark’s circus, with no home and no role except to travel around collecting more souls and breeding more sideshow freaks.
The worst of it is that not any old soul will do for Mr Dark. They must be battered and bruised, beaten down by circumstance, desirous of better times and personal gain. A happy soul is no use to the Pandemonium Shadow Show, as Will’s father Charles Halloran discovers when he defeats the carnival with the strongest weapon he can summon: laughter. Real, carefree laughter, which so many of us can’t remember how to make.
Mr Dark himself would undoubtedly throw open his tattooed hands at these accusations of villainy, claim innocently that no one is forced to sign his deals, no one rides the roundabout against their will. In truth, Mr Dark would not exist without the greed and desires of humanity. He is a villain of our own making, as potent today as he was when Bradbury wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes. Are we not all in whatever messes we’re in because we wanted more, demanded it all here and now, regardless of whether the price could truly be paid? What business he would have done in the new, kleptocratic, consumerist century.
"A master... Bradbury has a style all his own, much imitated but never matched."
— Portland Oregonian
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