Bradbury's use of ornate, elaborately metaphoric language reaches its extreme in Something Wicked This Way Comes and, as in many of his stories, those metaphors are required to carry a heavily allegorical freight. Characters with last names like Nightshade, Dark, and Halloway move through a realistically detailed, but frequently symbolic landscape. Jungian archetypes and Gothic transformations abound. Nothing is quite what it seems. Critics who appreciate the novel have argued that it is much more complex, and much more complexly structured, than its denigrators realize.