‘The Freakshow’ – Bryan Smith (Grindhouse Press)

With Brian Keene and Bryan Smith’s ‘Suburban Gothic’ being released at the end of the month; I thought it would be a good time to look at the two books that are going to feed into this new arrival. I’ve already had a few things to say about Brian Keene’s ‘Urban Gothic’ and you can read my review over Here; now Bryan Smith’s ‘The Freakshow’ gets it’s moment, and what a moment.

I’ve spent the last couple of days reading ‘The Freakshow’ and I think I’ve got my head round it, lets see if I can do it justice…

The Flaherty Brothers Traveling Carnivale and Freakshow has come to the quiet town of Pleasant Hills, Tennessee. But this is no ordinary sideshow and these are not the usual "freaks" on display. As the unsuspecting townsfolk gather for an evening of strange spectacle, the slaughter is set to begin...

‘The Freakshow’ took a little while to get into but once I was there… Well, it was just brilliant. I was creeped out and freaked out in equal measure and it was so much fun to read. Not only that but I think I’ve got a rough idea what to expect in ‘Suburban Gothic’ now, I can’t ask for a lot more than that really. It was a little difficult to get into and while that’s partly down to Smith’s approach, it was more a case of me looking for explanations that weren’t there; at least not to start with. ‘The Freakshow’ is very much a book that doesn’t explain itself, the horror is just there from the first page and it’s for you to make sense of it, Smith is having far too much fun turning your stomach to do all the work for you ;o) Once I got my head round that, reading ‘The Freakshow’ was even more fun as I realised I was really was experiencing every bit of horror at the same time as the characters. You really are left in no doubt as to why our human leads are trying to escape. There’s a sweet vein of the surreal running through some properly vile scenes where Smith just lays it all on the line for his reader to gasp at. And that’s the whole point, you can’t have a story about freaks if you’re not going to go hell for leather on the body horror and the abuse. Smith clearly gets this and is all too willing to deliver. It’s pulp horror at it’s absolute most disgusting yet fun at the same time, especially when Smith draws back the curtain a little more and you start to see that this goes far beyond a murderous circus.

Towards the end, you realise that there’s a lot more to ‘The Freakshow’ than you originally thought as Smith ‘zooms out’ a little and puts the whole thing into context. It’s a bold move to spring this on the reader, just before the story ends, but it just adds to all the pulp goodness that’s already there and also gives the whole thing a little fresh impetus to see it through to the end. It’s in keeping with the rest of the book and that’s the main thing.

It’s also interesting to see how being around the freaks can really bring out the dark side of the human characters. You could say that everyone in the book is a freak on the inside. I’m not so sure about that, it just really drives the plot in terms of what people will do to survive.

And that was ‘The Freakshow’ for me. Good, honest pulp-horror (with some sci-fi thrown in for good measure) that really goes all out to entertain, shock and make you feel a little sick, all at the same time. I am really looking forward now to seeing how all of this comes out in ‘Suburban Gothic’, not long to wait now…