Something Wicked This Way Comes Continuity

SPOILERS and stuff...

First of all, I've since learned that The Illustrated Man has had several editions, some including a couple of stories from The Martian Chronicles. That's gonna be difficult to work into the timeline...

Now I will demonstrate why I think Something Wicked This Way Comes is in the same timeline as The Illustrated Man.


First of all, The Illustrated Man in that book and Mr. Dark in Something Wicked both have bodies covered by tattoos, tattoos that move to some extent of their own accord.  These "crowds" of people and animals seem supernatural and bad in some way. The man from the book of short stories has images that tell the stories of future people who mostly end up in terrible situations, while Mr. Dark has images that act sort of like voodoo dolls: if he harms himself where an image is tattooed, the person in that image gets hurt.

Now there is Madamoiselle Tarot, the Dust Witch, in Something Wicked This Way Comes. She has her eyelids sewn shut with black thread, has some kind of supernatural manipulation of her surroundings, and can tell people's futures. In the same vein, the time-travelling tattoo artist from the future who gives the Illustrated Man his story-telling pictures...has her eyelids sewn shut (with red-resin thread this time), is keenly aware of her surroundings, and knows what happens in the future. The time-travelling woman is even called a "dust witch"!

In one of the books, there is time travel, in the other there is age travel. Okay, that one's a bit of a stretch...

The Illustrated Man was first published in 1951 and Something Wicked This Way Comes was published in 1962. Ray Bradbury had to know exactly what he was doing, intentionally using the same titles and descriptions for these characters. The question is, why? I'm not sure, but I'm going to use it to come up with a continuity theory.

First off, Dark and his carnival have been visiting Green Town off and on since 1846. The last visit before this was 1910. Since October 24 takes place on a Saturday in this story, and since it is based on Bradbury's childhood memories of a carnival (although the real Mr. Electrico was a nice guy...), and since he grew up in the twenties and early thirties, and Dandelion Wine (wherein there is no recent memory of events such as these) takes place in 1928, and since it makes most sense to place it as close as possible to this time period, I tentatively place the novel in 1931, the closest year after 1928 that has October 24 on a Saturday. This places it several years before "The Fox and the Forest".

Now, how could Mr. Dark and the other Illustrated Man be the same, if the latter got his tattoos in 1900? Well, as I said before, there is time travel. If the witch and the Illustrated Man travelled to the past after the end of the frame story (though it's unclear why he would since he wanted to kill her...) it could work, even with both Dark and the Dust Witch meeting their demise in Something Wicked.

In this scenario, the Illustrated Man has been prevented from killing the witch, has joined the side of evil, and Madamoiselle Tarot has re-stitched her eyes. Or perhaps, instead of killing her, he did something that ended up with her serving him.

Another option is that the Illustrated Man and the time travelling witch are the replacements for those who died. After all, Charles Halloway mentioned that such people may come again, and they wouldn't necessarily be in the form of a carnival. The Illustrated Man has left his carnival and the time-travelling witch has no known connection to one. Also, after Cooger has become a mummy, instead of "Cooger and Dark", Dark tells Jim it could be "Dark and Nightshade", suggesting a history of replacements, or at least the possibility for it.

In either scenario, it seems possible that time travel is involved in some way. In the I. M. book (it's easier at this point to type acronyms) many of the stories feature people being done in by their own fears and temptations, often via the advanced technology, similarly to how the carnival does to the folks of Green Town. Now this could possibly suggest that all the tricks at the carnival (the Mirror Maze, the carousel, etc.) are future technologies. I would say that's probably the case at least for the carousel, which had a fixed function and way of operating, and it had a specific control panel, while all the other things generally seemed more supernatural.

So in summary, we have similar characters with the same titles and descriptions, possible time travel, and possible future technologies. Some of these similarities had to have been on purpose, thus I conclude that they are set in the same world.

Next Time: a review of From the Dust Returned

Update: I have realized Something. If this book takes place in 1931 and the Carnival's last visit was in 1910, that's only 21 years. At least Miss Foley and some of the shopkeepers should remember that last visit, but they don't seem to. They would have been old enough then to be aware of it. Other options of years with October 24 on a Saturday are 1936 and 1942. The not remembering thing makes more sense the longer time period there is. And the townspeople in From the Dust Returned attacking the Family in what I suppose is 1945 makes more sense if it is a recent memory. So I conclude that the book actually takes place in 1942.