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3.56 AVERAGE
3.56 AVERAGE
Jamie is living his ordinary life, working his thankless job, and for some reason living with room mates who treat him badly and steal his food. Those days are coming to an end after Jamie has a strange experience with a clown that he nearly runs down with his car. After witnessing something he will wish he could unsee, Jamie steals a pouch left behind by a clown and with that he seals his fate. Now they want him for their twisted circus and joining up is not voluntary.
I loved this book from start to finish. It's creepy from practically the first page before we even get to the actual circus and meet an unforgettable cast of characters. I've already bought the sequel!
I loved this book from start to finish. It's creepy from practically the first page before we even get to the actual circus and meet an unforgettable cast of characters. I've already bought the sequel!
Eight months later and I'm still thinking about this book. I don't want to change my rating, though I can't say with certainty why I won't rate it higher. It was certainly the perfect depiction of bizzarro-horror which was highly enjoyable. Some descriptions of characters and what they did still haunt me today (unintentional dramaticism). My example is the teeth... If you read this you know... (omg and the destruction of the bed). It definitely served its purpose to disturb and unsettle very well. I think my criticism lies with the writing, it could certainly use some work, though after googling a bit I did see that this was Elliott's debut novel, so it's completely understandable. I am excited to see more from him.
I have to say that I really really loved this book. It's a very easy but enjoyable read, imo. I have never read any other book like it, it's very different. Alot of the "bad guys" I found to be very likable and I loved the world that Elliott drags you into. I don't think anyone who reads this book will ever look at clowns or the circus the same way ever again. It's a darker read but I also found it to have very funny moments through out the book. So if anyone is looking for a darker read that's actually different and some what funny, I highly highly recommend this book. I will def. be keeping my eyes out for another Will Elliott book.
Jamie is minding his own business when he spots some creepy clowns about town acting more than a wee bit strange. One drops a small bag containing some suspicious powder. When the coast is clear, Jamie picks it up and brings it home.
Well, wouldn’t you?!
This little incident of finders keepers brings the clown smack down upon Jamie and his roomie after the two accidentally ingest some of the clown powder. And there’s nothing funny about it. These clowns aren’t the happy go lucky, nose-honking types and they do some unimaginable gross-nasty things to Jamie’s abode. It’s pretty scary what they accomplish in a short span of time and from there on out Jamie’s life gets seriously messed up. Jamie finds this note tucked into the mouth of a dead bat:
Creepy, no?
Jamie, likely out of fear, does something so oddly funny that the demented clown leader actually laughs. He has passed the “audition” and is now a reluctant apprentice in The Pilo Family Circus. Jamie has no say so in the matter. The clowns are intimidating, persuasive and violently unpredictable. Jamie plays along, foolishly thinking he will make a quick exit from this nightmare as soon as he can. That doesn’t happen. Once the clown paint is slathered upon his face he becomes a new person and JJ the Clown takes over his body. JJ is unpredictable, mean just for kicks and refuses to follow the rules. He’s also a big cry baby which I have to say began to grate on my last nerve after a while. He also wants complete control of “the body” which was once owned by Jamie.
This is a weird ass book about a very twisted circus. The backdrop and the acts that inhabit this bizarre circus are painted with some vivid detail bringing the strange and tormented characters to life in my head. I could easily picture each one and felt especially bad for the once normal people touched by the “matter manipulator” who turned them into freaks for the sake of the show and were forced to do terrible, painful things to their bodies to entertain the masses. That bit disturbed the most. There are the typical petty jealousies you usually find in a book of this kind, with bad tempered carnies and lots of backstabbing but everything is amplified in this story. I don’t think I liked any of the characters, except for maybe Jamie, but I didn’t get to know him well enough to comment either way. And as much as I would’ve liked to have known more about the clowns, especially Doopy and his bizarre brother Goshy, this book wasn’t about getting all cozy with the characters. It was about the circus and the mayhem The Pilo’s unleashed upon the world. It was an imaginative book with some big ideas that wasn’t nearly as horrific in an in-yer-face sort of way as I’d anticipated. It took some big twists that surprised me but mostly I enjoyed the skewed writing.
Here’s a little taste of some of the offbeat descriptive moments and dialogue that litter the story:
And my personal favorite moment of dialogue:
This isn’t a book for everyone but if you’re in the mood for a uniquely strange read this will do the trick.
Well, wouldn’t you?!
This little incident of finders keepers brings the clown smack down upon Jamie and his roomie after the two accidentally ingest some of the clown powder. And there’s nothing funny about it. These clowns aren’t the happy go lucky, nose-honking types and they do some unimaginable gross-nasty things to Jamie’s abode. It’s pretty scary what they accomplish in a short span of time and from there on out Jamie’s life gets seriously messed up. Jamie finds this note tucked into the mouth of a dead bat:
“Sleep tight? Thirty hours to pass your audition. Make us laugh, feller. That’s the assignment. We don’t care how. We don’t care who gets hurt or killed. Make with the chuckles, you pass . . .
Gonko, on behalf of the Pilo Family Circus”
Creepy, no?
Jamie, likely out of fear, does something so oddly funny that the demented clown leader actually laughs. He has passed the “audition” and is now a reluctant apprentice in The Pilo Family Circus. Jamie has no say so in the matter. The clowns are intimidating, persuasive and violently unpredictable. Jamie plays along, foolishly thinking he will make a quick exit from this nightmare as soon as he can. That doesn’t happen. Once the clown paint is slathered upon his face he becomes a new person and JJ the Clown takes over his body. JJ is unpredictable, mean just for kicks and refuses to follow the rules. He’s also a big cry baby which I have to say began to grate on my last nerve after a while. He also wants complete control of “the body” which was once owned by Jamie.
This is a weird ass book about a very twisted circus. The backdrop and the acts that inhabit this bizarre circus are painted with some vivid detail bringing the strange and tormented characters to life in my head. I could easily picture each one and felt especially bad for the once normal people touched by the “matter manipulator” who turned them into freaks for the sake of the show and were forced to do terrible, painful things to their bodies to entertain the masses. That bit disturbed the most. There are the typical petty jealousies you usually find in a book of this kind, with bad tempered carnies and lots of backstabbing but everything is amplified in this story. I don’t think I liked any of the characters, except for maybe Jamie, but I didn’t get to know him well enough to comment either way. And as much as I would’ve liked to have known more about the clowns, especially Doopy and his bizarre brother Goshy, this book wasn’t about getting all cozy with the characters. It was about the circus and the mayhem The Pilo’s unleashed upon the world. It was an imaginative book with some big ideas that wasn’t nearly as horrific in an in-yer-face sort of way as I’d anticipated. It took some big twists that surprised me but mostly I enjoyed the skewed writing.
Here’s a little taste of some of the offbeat descriptive moments and dialogue that litter the story:
“George Pilo marched in with someone at his heels, a fat man with eyes so close together it looked like they were sharing a socket.”
And my personal favorite moment of dialogue:
“Listen up. Shut your fuck flaps!”
This isn’t a book for everyone but if you’re in the mood for a uniquely strange read this will do the trick.
I felt no spine-curdling. The hair on the back of my neck did not stand up. I did not feel the need to cuddle up under the covers with my back to wall and my dogs flanking me on both sides. These are the things that should happen when I read a horror novel. I found this one mediocre at best.
Will Elliott, The Pilo Family Circus (Underland Press, 2006)
I am going to start this review by saying two things that I don't believe I have ever said together in a single review: that this book has some serious flaws, and that it's almost guaranteed to make my best reads of the year list. Yes, despite its flaws (one in particular, upon which I will no doubt dwell like a bobby-soxer mourning the death of Ricky Nelson), this is a book that reaches so far down into the dark places of the human soul that it blasted its way onto the must-read list long before I hit the halfway point. For the record, I'm not the only one who thinks so; the book was much-lauded in its native Australia, as any of its press will tell you (it won five awards in 2006, ranging from specialized horror awards to broad literary ones), and was short-listed for the Stoker here in America. The only real drawback: like a number of other amazing Oceania media, once it got to our shores, it has suffered a brutal lack of publicity. I'm only one person, but I'm going to try and help that change, a little, because you need to read this book.
Jamie is a typical twenty-something slacker in Brisbane. He has the job he has mostly because it affords him large amounts of free time (and the rest is because he wants to date one of the bartenders), he lives with a couple of drugged-out friends of ill repute, and thanks to his working hours he often wanders the streets when no one else is about. Well, almost no one. On the way home from work one night, he is forced to slam on the brakes when he finds a clown standing in the middle of the road. The two have an odd moment, then the clown wanders off, and Jamie drives home, discomfited. (No surprise there. We all know clowns are the epitome of evil, yes?) Soon after, he sees the same clown, with two others, and spies on them. Why does he spy on them? Because he knows that he doesn't want them seeing him. While spying, he finds a small velvet bag on the ground. And it is there that his woes begin, for when he picks it up, and when he inadvertently ingests a bit of the contents while playing a stupid practical joke on Steve (one of said housemates), he draws the clowns' attention to him. And thus we come to the beginning of the jacket copy: the clowns want him to... audition.
All that bit is actually kind of slow. Once we get to the Pilo Family Circus (and that we get there is not a spoiler, again because of the jacket copy) is when the book really spreads its wings and begins to soar. Elliott is a diagnosed schizophrenic, so when you see him writing about a character whose personality is at war with itself (Jamie the person becomes JJ the clown. It's not a split personality, per se, though Elliott does play that aspect of it up. Winston, another of the clowns, tells Jamie that the clown make up, which is an odd blend of hallucinogen and mutagen, alters the clowns' personalities; in effect, form the reader's perspective, it makes you more you; the Jamie who pulled the prank on Steve that got them into this mess becomes the JJ whose pranks are malicious, and sometimes deadly, to the other carnies), you know he's got a better handle on that sort of thing than your average author. And the character of Jamie/JJ is so wonderfully drawn, in the circus, that even if it were a single-character novel, it would be well worth reading.
It is not, however, which provides both the book's greatest strength—its endlessly fascinating plot, the machinations of which mirror Jamie/JJ's internal struggle without ever feeling forced (one wonders whether it was even conscious on Elliott's part), and its greatest weakness—Jamie/JJ's interactions with other characters. The example that sticks in my head is one of the other clowns, Rufshod. There's a point at which JJ and Ruf pull a prank on another carny, after which JJ muses that Ruf could easily become his closest friend in the carnival. Ruf, despite being a minor character at that point, is very intriguing, and he's well-drawn for a minor character, and the reader can't help but look forward to the two of them becoming friends, mirroring Jamie's student/mentor relationship with Winston. But that never happens; it's as if Elliott wrote that with every intention of delving father into what never became a subplot at all. While that's the most obvious example, it's far from the only one. After mulling over the book in the light of Katherine Dunn's introduction, I think this may have had to do with Elliott's headlong approach to writing the book, which he completed (in multiple drafts, no less!) in an unreal, almost Amanda Hocking-style time. I think, had Elliott taken a bit more care in rewrites of going back and picking up those lost threads, I'd be sitting here telling you in no uncertain terms that despite us only being a quarter of the way through 2011, this would be sitting atop my best reads of the year list come December 31.
That said, Elliott's incredible gifts for characterization, even if he can't get those characters to believably interact in some cases, and even more incredible gifts for description of the little island of Hell that is the Pilo Family Circus, make this a fascinating little phantasmagoria that I was sadder to see end than anything I've read since Robin Hobb finished up the Tawny Man trilogy. It is equal parts, again from the reader's perspective, awesome thriller, genius bizarro (even if Elliott is not considered a part of the movement; I don't know one way or the other), and fascinating look into the mind of a schizophrenic author who happens to be very, very gifted. You may have to go out of your way to find this. No library in the vast Ohio networks my library belongs to had a copy. Trust me, though, you want to. Despite its problems, a stunning read. ****
I am going to start this review by saying two things that I don't believe I have ever said together in a single review: that this book has some serious flaws, and that it's almost guaranteed to make my best reads of the year list. Yes, despite its flaws (one in particular, upon which I will no doubt dwell like a bobby-soxer mourning the death of Ricky Nelson), this is a book that reaches so far down into the dark places of the human soul that it blasted its way onto the must-read list long before I hit the halfway point. For the record, I'm not the only one who thinks so; the book was much-lauded in its native Australia, as any of its press will tell you (it won five awards in 2006, ranging from specialized horror awards to broad literary ones), and was short-listed for the Stoker here in America. The only real drawback: like a number of other amazing Oceania media, once it got to our shores, it has suffered a brutal lack of publicity. I'm only one person, but I'm going to try and help that change, a little, because you need to read this book.
Jamie is a typical twenty-something slacker in Brisbane. He has the job he has mostly because it affords him large amounts of free time (and the rest is because he wants to date one of the bartenders), he lives with a couple of drugged-out friends of ill repute, and thanks to his working hours he often wanders the streets when no one else is about. Well, almost no one. On the way home from work one night, he is forced to slam on the brakes when he finds a clown standing in the middle of the road. The two have an odd moment, then the clown wanders off, and Jamie drives home, discomfited. (No surprise there. We all know clowns are the epitome of evil, yes?) Soon after, he sees the same clown, with two others, and spies on them. Why does he spy on them? Because he knows that he doesn't want them seeing him. While spying, he finds a small velvet bag on the ground. And it is there that his woes begin, for when he picks it up, and when he inadvertently ingests a bit of the contents while playing a stupid practical joke on Steve (one of said housemates), he draws the clowns' attention to him. And thus we come to the beginning of the jacket copy: the clowns want him to... audition.
All that bit is actually kind of slow. Once we get to the Pilo Family Circus (and that we get there is not a spoiler, again because of the jacket copy) is when the book really spreads its wings and begins to soar. Elliott is a diagnosed schizophrenic, so when you see him writing about a character whose personality is at war with itself (Jamie the person becomes JJ the clown. It's not a split personality, per se, though Elliott does play that aspect of it up. Winston, another of the clowns, tells Jamie that the clown make up, which is an odd blend of hallucinogen and mutagen, alters the clowns' personalities; in effect, form the reader's perspective, it makes you more you; the Jamie who pulled the prank on Steve that got them into this mess becomes the JJ whose pranks are malicious, and sometimes deadly, to the other carnies), you know he's got a better handle on that sort of thing than your average author. And the character of Jamie/JJ is so wonderfully drawn, in the circus, that even if it were a single-character novel, it would be well worth reading.
It is not, however, which provides both the book's greatest strength—its endlessly fascinating plot, the machinations of which mirror Jamie/JJ's internal struggle without ever feeling forced (one wonders whether it was even conscious on Elliott's part), and its greatest weakness—Jamie/JJ's interactions with other characters. The example that sticks in my head is one of the other clowns, Rufshod. There's a point at which JJ and Ruf pull a prank on another carny, after which JJ muses that Ruf could easily become his closest friend in the carnival. Ruf, despite being a minor character at that point, is very intriguing, and he's well-drawn for a minor character, and the reader can't help but look forward to the two of them becoming friends, mirroring Jamie's student/mentor relationship with Winston. But that never happens; it's as if Elliott wrote that with every intention of delving father into what never became a subplot at all. While that's the most obvious example, it's far from the only one. After mulling over the book in the light of Katherine Dunn's introduction, I think this may have had to do with Elliott's headlong approach to writing the book, which he completed (in multiple drafts, no less!) in an unreal, almost Amanda Hocking-style time. I think, had Elliott taken a bit more care in rewrites of going back and picking up those lost threads, I'd be sitting here telling you in no uncertain terms that despite us only being a quarter of the way through 2011, this would be sitting atop my best reads of the year list come December 31.
That said, Elliott's incredible gifts for characterization, even if he can't get those characters to believably interact in some cases, and even more incredible gifts for description of the little island of Hell that is the Pilo Family Circus, make this a fascinating little phantasmagoria that I was sadder to see end than anything I've read since Robin Hobb finished up the Tawny Man trilogy. It is equal parts, again from the reader's perspective, awesome thriller, genius bizarro (even if Elliott is not considered a part of the movement; I don't know one way or the other), and fascinating look into the mind of a schizophrenic author who happens to be very, very gifted. You may have to go out of your way to find this. No library in the vast Ohio networks my library belongs to had a copy. Trust me, though, you want to. Despite its problems, a stunning read. ****
http://shelf-monkey.blogspot.com/2009/01/pilo-family-circus-by-will-elliot.html
The description of the book on goodreads says this book has "echoes of Lovecraft, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, and early Stephen King."
So yeah, I don't know why I read it, because I don't like any of those authors but King. (And I'm not hugely fond of King's early stuff.) I would add that the book has shades of David Wong's John Dies at the End, but it's missing the compassion and the emotional pull.
I didn't really care about Jamie or any of the characters. I was appalled at the casual racism. I wasn't horrified at any point, just squicked.
So yeah, I don't know why I read it, because I don't like any of those authors but King. (And I'm not hugely fond of King's early stuff.) I would add that the book has shades of David Wong's John Dies at the End, but it's missing the compassion and the emotional pull.
I didn't really care about Jamie or any of the characters. I was appalled at the casual racism. I wasn't horrified at any point, just squicked.