CRwM passed his copy of this along to me after not liking it very much; our tastes in horror diverge pretty significantly at some points, and he figured even odds that I might like it better. In fact, I do. I wasn't nearly as put-off by the admittedly silly and pretentious front- and back-matter. In fairness to Elliott, his account in his own words of the writing process is more modest and matter-of-fact than the breathless "About the Book" page in this volume. Also, given the chance to endorse more "literary" interpretations of Pilo, he demurs, preferring to emphasize the horror aspects--in creditable contrast to these folks, who are only too eager to insist/boast that their books "transcend the genre." All of this is really incidental, though, to the question of how well the novel stands up on its own, so on to the main event . . .The opening establishes our hero Jamie as a familiar type: Gen-XYZ-er with a worthless arts degree, crummy job, unenviable living situation, and pathetic social life. Strictly speaking, he's never developed much beyond that--though not necessarily to bad effect. CRwM puts it this way:
Happily, even Elliott's authorial weaknesses serve him well in the beginning. Jaime's [sic] fairly vacuous characterization, for example, makes him a pretty decent avatar for the reader, who can experience the oddness of the circus without the distraction of seeing it "through" Jaime.I'd agree, and go a little further, spin it a bit more positively. Not all "vacuous characterization" is created equal. For example, it's one of my chief complaints about Bryan Smith's Freakshow, where it doesn't seem to produce the same redeeming quality. Sometimes characterization is simply vacuous, full-stop. But sometimes, characterization appears vacuous, when in fact, most of the interesting aspects of a protagonist or viewpoint character have been projected into other elements, such as story, setting, other characters, etc. Steve Rasnic Tem calls this "dream characterization" (on the theory that, "every object in a dream is a piece of the dreamer"), and argues that it's especially common--appropriately so--in fantastic fiction and especially supernatural horror:
Adapting this theory to horror fiction, we might say that all other objects in the story--the landscape, the other characters, the supernatural presence, even the individual events--represent some aspect of the protagonist (or victim). Each piece suggests or tells us something about our main character. Far more, I suspect, than a delineation of traits and opinions ever could. This dark moor reflects an inner terrain that is the character's alone. These people would not be here in the story except that the character needed them to be, perhaps because they embody essential aspects of the character, or represent the various points-of-view of his or her own internal dialogue. This horrifying presence is a child of the character's worst fears and suppressed imaginings. And somehow we know that these events could not have happened to any other person, in quite the same way, no matter how perfectly ordinary or innocent the character seems to be.Tem goes on to note that, to the degree that such characterization is present in a story, the protagonist is never wholly innocent (a specific example of this is the notion that the vampire can't enter a dwelling uninvited). This is one big difference between Smith's Freakshow and Elliott's Pilo Family Circus. As I mentioned in my review, Smith takes some pains to emphasize the randomness of his horror. Protagonists Mike and Heather may not be innocent in any absolute sense--Heather, in particular, has a guilty conscience over a secret crime she once got away with--but neither are they implicated in any significant way in anything that the Freakshow inflicts on the town of Pleasant Hills. There's a sense that all of this really could happen to anyone. And if you, Gentle Reader, can be persuaded that all of this might happen to anyone, why, it could even happen to you. This kind of horror has never actually affected me that way, but I think that's a fair statement of the (fundamentally misguided) thinking behind this disconnect some creators interpose between characters and the horror they face.
All the elements fit together economically to make a solid object. Character becomes inseparable from setting, plot, and atmosphere, simply because we are using setting, plot, and atmosphere to characterize.
I think many writers use this sort of dream characterization intuitively when they write in the fantastic mode. The very nature of writing in the fantastic mode, and its similarity to dreaming, forces writers to characterize this way, at least in part, whatever their chosen theoretical approach. . . .
I also suspect that this peculiar method of fantastic or dream characterization accounts for some of the criticism occasionally leveled at some writers of the fantastic concerning the supposed two-dimensionality of their characters. Because of long-ingrained reading habits, the critic has first artificially separated the so-called elements of characterization from the rest of the story, examined only these elements, and then declared the piece "wanting in characterization." As should be apparent by now, when such a methodology is applied to fantastic literature, such as the nightmare tales of a Kafka, the characterization will be missed simply because the critic is looking for it in the wrong place.
By contrast, Elliott profoundly implicates Jamie in everything that befalls him and many other characters. Adapting the simple method of pattern recognition proposed in Ian Fleming's Dr. No--"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."--we can say that unexpectedly encountering a clown on a deserted road at night is happenstance, following and spying on that clown is curiosity, but taking home a velvet pouch of powder that fell out of that clown's pocket, pouring that powder into your own milk carton (ostensibly as a prank on a roommate who eats and drinks all your food without paying for any of it), then "accidentally" drinking later from that milk carton . . . well, now we're talking full-on complicity.
Once Jamie has taken this fateful step, a trio of nightmarish clowns immediately begins to torment him, in both dreams and waking life. They terrorize him into auditioning to join them as a clown in the Pilo Family Circus. Rebecca Pearson complains in her review that,
This is where I have a problem: it's never sufficiently explained why Jamie doesn't go straight to the police. However, he goes along with the sinister clowns, and concocts an audition stunt. He even goes on to do that awful horror-movie device of covering up when the police do get involved. It bothered me for quite some time: I found that "No one bends further than someone made of completely straight lines" was an inadequate explanation.By this point, you can probably guess my thinking on the matter: Jamie doesn't involve the police, and actually hinders them, because on some fundamental level, he's going where he needs to, in his dealings with the clowns, no matter how horrific and traumatizing to him those dealings may appear. I'm not sure that makes this device any less clunky, considering how often it's been overused and abused as a lazy narrative convenience, but at least there is some contextual justification for it in this case, which is further reinforced when--surprise, surprise--Jamie passes his audition.
The ultimate justification comes when Jamie slathers on the magic facepaint provided by the circus. This stuff confers a number of clown "powers," mainly being able to engage in slapstick violent enough to kill a normal human, but most importantly, it brings out the "inner clown" of anyone who wears it. Jamie's is a real humdinger, and more of a handful than even his fellow clowns can control. One of the circus acrobats bitterly accuses, "He is clown, through and through."
This brings us to the primary kind of horror this novel delivers. In Freakshow, there are monstrous clowns, but they're really just monsters that look like clowns. They don't actually try to be funny, that we ever see. They just look creepy and try to kill people. In Pilo Family Circus, by contrast, Elliott has a serious go at depicting clowns as monsters by taking laughter back to the sinister roots described by J. C. Gregory in The Nature of Laughter:
As laughter emerges with man from the mists of antiquity it seems to hold a dagger in its hand. There is enough brutal triumph, enough contempt, enough striking down from superiority in the records of antiquity and its estimates of laughter to presume that original laughter may have been wholly animosity.Jonathan Wilcox goes on to note that, for example, Grendel--an embodiment of malice and wanton carnage, and possibly a partial inspiration for Elliott's beastly ringmaster Kurt Pilo--laughs softly to himself at the prospect of slaughtering a hall full of sleeping men. Similarly, Pilo's "barely audible 'Ohhh, ho ho ho,'" after Jamie makes him the butt of a climactically vicious prank, is one of the most ominous moments of the novel:
Hardened carnies who had until now believed they'd seen it all shied away from the proprietor as he prowled through the wreckage, laughing that laugh.The more usual blending of horror with humor sends the horror up for yuks. Pilo Family Circus tacks against that stream, by playing its pervasive dark humor for chills.
It's Elliott's first published novel, it's hardly perfect, and as always, YMMV, but I enjoyed Pilo Family Circus tremendously, and would highly recommend it to anyone in the mood for horror in a circus setting.
