Books like Something Wicked This Way Comes
A child carries a lantern into the dark, and its flame turns fear, wonder, love, and mortality into the same trembling light.
If you liked Something Wicked This Way Comes, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Something Wicked This Way Comes, and we tell you exactly what.
Like Bradbury, McCammon treats childhood imagination not as an escape from reality but as a way of seeing reality whole. In the opening, young Cory Mackenson and his father witness a car plunge into a seemingly bottomless lake—a nightmare that unsettles both the town’s secrets and the boy’s faith in adult protection.
The language has Bradbury’s delighted abundance, while the relationship between Cory and his father carries the same emotional weight as Will and Charles Halloway: love made urgent by the discovery that fathers are vulnerable. Winner of the World Fantasy Award and the book many McCammon readers cherish most, Boy’s Life is expansive, generous, frightening, and saturated with the conviction that growing up costs something precious.
For readers who wanted Bradbury’s carnival to remain dangerous after the tents came down. Young Sam Southall loses a tooth and encounters a creature that is neither the dainty visitor promised by childhood folklore nor safely imaginary. From that intrusion, Joyce creates a volatile presence—seductive, spiteful, funny, and terrifying—that gives physical form to the confusions children cannot articulate.
The Tooth Fairy is rougher and more adult than Bradbury, but it shares his deepest insight: supernatural horror becomes powerful when it presses on ordinary shame, desire, loyalty, and fear. Joyce won the British Fantasy Award for this novel, and its refusal to explain away its central mystery has earned it lasting devotion. It feels like a forbidden cousin to Something Wicked This Way Comes.
An adult returns to the landscape of his childhood and remembers a neighboring farmhouse, three remarkable women, and a pond that was once called an ocean. Gaiman’s short novel moves with the lucid inevitability of a remembered nightmare: domestic spaces become mythic, ancient powers enter ordinary lives, and a child must confront dangers adults cannot perceive.
What binds it most strongly to Bradbury is its tenderness toward frightened children—and toward the lonely, compromised adults they become. Its simple sentences conceal enormous emotional pressure, especially around memory, sacrifice, and the stories we tell to survive. A Locus Award winner now widely regarded as one of Gaiman’s defining novels, it can be read in an evening, but its final ache is difficult to shake.