[For the previous Dark Carnival post, click here.]

“Jack-in-the-Box” (1947)

Like the “trapped toy” of the title, thirteen-year-old Edwin is subjected to a very sheltered existence. He’s confined to the family mansion by his mentally unbalanced mother, who sounds dire warnings of “Beasts” beyond the forest, and mourns the passing of Edwin’s father (who she calls “God”), “struck down by one of those Terrors on the road.” Removed from the world at large and kept ignorant of its workings, Edwin’s perspective is understandably naive. He confuses a secret elevator in the house as a “dusty dull brown closet,” and refers to an airplane spied flying in the sky as a “chromium bird thing.” Nor does Edwin realize that his mother and Teacher (in hooded costume) are one and the same. When the latter goes missing, and the former is found sprawled drunkenly on the floor, Edwin ventures out of the house and into the “Outlands” for assistance. Overjoyed about the abundance of interesting objects and people he discovers, Edwin (having internalized his mother’s lessons about what awaited him outside the “Universe” of home), happily cries, “I’m glad I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead, it’s good to be dead!”

“Jack-in-the-Box” constitutes something of an oddity. Its narrative situation is marked by strangeness, yet the story feels different from the other weird tales gathered in the collection. Bradbury’s penchant for waxing metaphorical proves a bit confusing here, confounding the reader’s attempt to get a purchase on the story world presented. Yes, it does feature Bradbury’s central theme of mortality, but in its straining toward some sort of profundity of meaning, the story forms an imperfect fit with the other Bradburian acts assembled into the Dark Carnival.

[For the previous Dark Carnival post, click here.]

“Interim” (1947)

“Shortly before dawn,” there comes a “kind of dim pulsing and whispering under the earth.” The setting is gradually revealed as a graveyard, and the noise turns out to be an afterlife telegraph “code”: buried bodies beating upon their coffin lids. That night’s stirring message concerns the deceased Mrs. Lattimore, who came to the graveyard a year ago “just before the planned birth of her child,” and now somehow is about to deliver the baby belatedly.

This two-page story (which today would be classified as flash fiction) is hard to find; it was never carried over into The October Country, and perhaps for good reason. “Interim” strains the suspension of disbelief: would the corpse of a nine-months-pregnant woman be interred with her unborn child still inside her? And why is she coming to posthumous term just now? Even the other inhabitants of the graveyard are riddled with “questioning hysteria,” wondering “How can this thing be?” The story does evince Bradbury’s tendency to wax lyrical over the morbid (he describes the coffins as “each a womb for silent, stiffened contents”), and the premise of underground gossip via coffin thumping is intriguing, but one wishes that Bradbury had constructed a better narrative around the idea.

[For the previous Dark Carnival post, click here.]

“The Crowd” (1943)

Bradbury’s protagonist, Mr. Spallner, manages to walk away from a car accident, but is shaken by the thought of those who gathered at the scene: “That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man’s agony by their frank curiosity.” There’s “a vast wrongness” to such prompt gatherings, as Spallner confirms when he studies news photos from over a several years’ period and discovers the same group of faces mixed in among the crowds. This uncanny clique unfailingly appears: “At a fire or an explosion or on the sidelines of a war, at any public demonstration of this thing called death. Vultures, hyenas, or saints,” Spallner speculates, but the answer definitely shades toward the sinister. Not only do these looming onlookers suck up the gasping victim’s air, they also deliberately, murderously jostle those with spinal injuries (such as Spallner, when he is involved in a second car accident before he can deliver his evidence about the group to the authorities). And as if all this weren’t horrific enough, Spallner realizes at tale’s end that there’s no escaping the crowd even in death. His dying words indicate that the members of the crowd aren’t human busybodies, but posthumous entities: “It–looks like I’ll–be joining up with you. I–guess I’ll be a member of–your–group–now.”

This chilling narrative underscores the gross disadvantage of the individual against the societal masses–a theme that never loses its relevancy. “The Crowd” is hauntingly memorable: the reader is unlikely to look at accident scenes (and those who flock to them) the same way ever again. I know this particular story (one of my all-time favorite Bradbury pieces) has left a deep imprint on my imagination; it inspired my own story riff “Theater Crowd,” which was published in the 2021 anthology Terrifying Ghosts.

[For the previous Dark Carnival post, click here.]

“The Traveler” (1945)

The second story in Dark Carnival featuring the positively monstrous Elliot Family of Mellin Town is set a few months after “Homecoming” and centers on the character of Cecy (based on Bradbury’s beloved Aunt Neva). Cecy’s extraordinary gift–the ability to project herself into another creature–is expanded upon: “It was more than telepathy, up one flue and down another. This was complete separation from one body environment into another. It was entrance into tree-nozzling dogs, men, old maids, birds, children at hopscotch, lovers on their morning beds, into workers asweat with shoveling, into unborn babies’ pink, dream-small brains.”

As the mentally-adventuring Cecy lies comatose in her bedroom, she is burst in on by her shady Uncle John. Being driven crazy by the peal of “holy church bells” in his head, John is desperate for Cecy to enter into him and clean out his cranium. Cecy’s Mother explains that Cecy is presently unavailable, and unlikely to help, considering the traitorous and treacherous uncle’s past betrayals of the Family (certain members ended up staked through the heart after being exposed to the authorities by John, who was paid a $100 fee for every relative ratted out). Determined to be cured of the noise inside his head, John threatens to go the local sheriff and expose the Elliots as “a wicked family, living under false pretenses.” But he is foiled at every turn, and after he finally commits suicide (his only perceived escape from the bells), Cecy reveals that she was the one creating that holy racket in John’s head all along.

The fantasy elements of the story allow Bradbury to engage in some amazing permutations (e.g., Cecy experiencing the world from a crayfish’s viewpoint, or speaking through a dead man’s lips). Cecy’s extensive mental traveling (“She loved riding the monster [train] engines as far as as could stretch the contact [with the conductor]”) also speaks to Bradbury’s own wanderlust as he grew up amongst his family in Waukegan. A tale about identity and assimilation and persecution and the dangers of difference, “The Traveler” remains as timely today as it was upon its first publication (in Weird Tales) and 1947 collection in Dark Carnival.