Circus, carnival, and sideshow novels for fans of the late Katherine Dunn
This list was created to honor the recently-passed Katherine Dunn, whose novel Geek Love is beloved by readers and has been an inspiration to many authors.
There are three basic types of circus/carny stories—horror tales like Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, realistic depictions of life and love and loss under the big top like Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants or Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter, and then there’s Katherine Dunn: champion of freaks and other human oddities; their stories laced with magic, fantasy, the unexpected. All three types are represented here, but the list is weighted towards the kinds of books I expect Ms. Dunn would have enjoyed—the fabulist tales, be they dark or light, that celebrate the unusual and embrace the outsider.
Katherine Dunn, you will be missed.
A delightfully fresh take on the theme, here cryptids and human-cryptid hybrids walk among us…except for all the ones thrown in cages against their will and exhibited as freaks to the delight and disgust of a human audience. Delilah has always felt inexplicably drawn to cryptids, and pitied their plight. Unfortunately, their plight becomes her own when her true nature manifests and she herself becomes an attraction
Not to be confused with Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus (although that book would also be at home on this list, at least until it got eaten by a bigger, darker book). But THIS one is Angela Carter at her brilliantly dirty and magical best, all boiling down to this one question: Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe’s capitals, part swan…or all fake?
The Final Confession of Mabel Stark
A fictionalized biography of Mabel Stark; a female tiger tamer with the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus who performed during the early twentieth century. In this book, the vivacious eighty-year-old Mabel recounts the adventures of her life, both professional and romantic. It’s a comedic romp that celebrates the golden age of the circus and the brassy woman at the center of it all.
Katherine Dunn blurbed this one, so you know it’s legit! It’s the story of a good man (a librarian!), whose life is falling apart when he receives a book in the mail; the logbook of a traveling carnival employing generations of his female ancestors, all circus mermaids who drowned on the same date over the years; the same date his own mother drowned. Magical realism, mystery & family story, with a pinch of romance.
This debut novel takes place in turn-of-the-century New York after the Church of Marvels, a circus/sideshow on Coney Island, burns down and the two Church sisters are separated, their mother dead in the fire. Told from a number of perspectives, this novel is both a gritty and beautiful historical novel full of surprises and the unexpectedly overlapping paths of its unforgettable characters.
This book shares its Coney Island setting with The Church of Marvels and its emphasis upon tattoos with The Book of Speculation, but is definitely its own thing—a very descriptive piece of literary fiction that is both a love story and a heavily-researched historical novel in which you will learn a great deal about tattooing.
This one is the most like Geek Love in terms of its motley cast of characters: a hunchback clown, a lizard girl, a bearded lady, a drunk monkey and some very spooky twins who are all members of a surreal traveling circus in the 1960’s, which is being stalked by a mysterious man.
The American Dream seen through a noir lens, this book is about a con man’s pursuit of that one big score, working as a mentalist, seducing the married fortune teller, separating the rubes from their hard-earned money, working all the gritty angles and—naturally—setting himself up for his inevitable destruction, without which no noir tale would be complete.
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti
A steampunk carnival traveling through war-torn lands featuring performers with grotesque and magical mechanical parts, this book is recounted in a series of genre-busting vignettes detailing the world of, and the world outside of, the carnival, in all its great and terrible beauty.
The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno
Like The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, this book is a fictionalized account of the life of a performer in the Barnum and Bailey franchise, although Bartholomew Fortuno—The World’s Thinnest Man—was part of Barnum’s American Museum, where human oddities were put on display; the first ‘freak show’ of its kind.
