Tag: freakshow

Freaks and Freakshows

I’ve read a few books about freak shows. I loved Nightmare Alley, and I seem to recall a Tom Piccirilli novel featuring a geek. I read Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love a few years ago but decided against reviewing it here despite really enjoying it. I quite like freaks. I feel a cetain kinship with them. I was on holidays during the summer and read a book called Freakshow that came out on Loompanics. I had no idea what it would be like, but Loompanics was an alternative publisher that used to put out books on drugs and conspiracy theories, so I had high hopes.

Freakshow – Jacquin Sanders

Loompanics – 1995 (first published 1954)

Freakshow was originally published in 1954, and it used to be titled Strip the Heart. I thought it was pretty good. It’s about Bat Fidler, a cranky, violent asshole who gets a job as a carnival wrestler. He sparks up a relationship with a stripper, but ends up falling in love with a woman with no arms who is exhibited in the Freakshow as “Fishgirl”. He ends up murdering a lad. There’s a mentally challenged lad in the carnival called Egghead who likes having eggs thrown at his face. The whole thing is rather grim, and I think it qualifies as noir. (I’m still a little unsure of the boundaries of that genre.) Either way, this was an enjoyable holiday read that got me thinking of what life was like for carnival freaks. I decided to seek out a nonfiction book on this topic.

Freak Babylon – Jack Hunter

The Glitterbooks of London – 2005

I didn’t spend much time figuring out the best book on freaks to read. I just went with the first book I could get my hands on. It was Jack Hunter’s Freak Babylon.

The first section confused me by listing the Necronomicon as a source, but I looked up other books referenced here, and they were all real. Much of the book is taken up describing freaks from history. Unsurprisingly, most of these people lived very sad lives, and many of them were horribly exploited. There’s not a huge amount of detail for many of these characters, and at times it feels like the author is struggling to fill pages. There is a section describing the atrocities performed on deformed or disabled people by Joseph Mengele in Auschwitz. There’s another on thalidomide babies. I was repulsed reading these sections, but in fairness to the author, I think his point in bringing these topics up was to highlight the hardships faced by anyone born different. Still, I would have prepared more of a focus on carnival freaks.

There’s lots of pictures in here, including some shots of people with deformed genitals. You probably like that kind of thing.

When I came across this picture, I realised it had appeared on this blog before.

There’s 2 large appendices here, one describing the life of the Elephant Man and the other discussing Tod Browning’s Freaks. Both felt like filler. I went back and watched Freaks for the first time in ages. It’s a classic.

Honestly, this was a depressing read. Human beings are truly despicable creatures. We’re mere decades away from locking up and displaying mentally handicapped children for fun. As a species, we’re utterly compassionless, and our capacity to exploit others is limitless. The sooner we’re gone, the better. I don’t know why I didn’t expect this book to make me feel this way.

Freaks and Con-Artists – William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley – William Lindsay Gresham
Rinehart and Company – 1946

Most of the books I’ve read over the past few years have been horror novels. I generally read 1 non-horror book every month, but I don’t discuss those here. When I started reading Nightmare Alley, I didn’t intend on reviewing it, but after finishing it, I needed to set some thoughts down. This is now one of my favourite novels

In most horror novels, there is good and evil. Sometimes the evil is triumphant, but the books are about vampires or slime creatures, and the reader knows that these don’t exist, so it’s easy to put the books down and not let them interfere with how you see the real world.

Nightmare Alley doesn’t feature vampires or slime creatures, but every page of it screams that human beings are deeply flawed creatures. Everyone is out for themselves. There are no bonds between people that are sacred or permanent. Existence is a competitive, futile nightmare.

This is a novel about Stanton Carlisle. He’s a magician in a carnival freak show. Throughout the novel, he manipulates whoever he can to get ahead. After a while, he becomes a succesful spiritualist and runs his own Church. The freaks and the occulty stuff Stanton peddles are probably enough to warrant this book’s inclusion on this site, but the bleak outlook guaranteed it.

“In a patch of silver the Rev. Carlisle stopped and raised his face to the full moon, where it hung desolately, agonizingly bright – a dead thing watching the dying earth.”

The opening chapter is a conversation between the protagonist and the leader of the freak show about where to find a geek. (A geek, for those who don’t know, is a man who bites the head off chickens.) The boss explains that geeks aren’t found. They’re made. The explanation he provides is brutal and poignant.

I’m sure that countless edgy writers of bizarro and horror fiction have set stories in freakshows. (Remember that classic X-Files episode?) A freakshow presents so many opportunities for weirdness, but Gresham never cashes in on this. The freaks here are real people, and they’re just as willing to walk all over others as anyone else in the novel, maybe even moreso due to their experiences. There wasn’t a single moment in the book that wasn’t entirely believable.

This was a great one. Most of the stuff I review on this blog is shit compared to this book. There’s a new movie version coming out later this year, but don’t wait for that. Read this book now.