Human oddities compel and repulse us, even given the enlightenment we claim today. It’s the old car crash dilemma: we don’t really want to see it, yet we can’t help but stop and look. My interest in sideshows dates to the 1960s-era North Florida fair and to the first time I saw the 1932 Tod Browning movie “Freaks.” What were these folks’ lives really like? What did they dream of or hope for, or despise? I’ve learned that their difference often spawned strife with their families, as parents hid children they saw as unnatural, or sold them if they thought there was a profit to be made. Weirdness was scorned or neglected, or sometimes revered. The lure of such wonders has speckled our history, from the Romans’ intrigue with all malformed things to the persecution and abuse wrought by the Middle Ages. It’s not hard to find demonization of “unnatural” people even now.
My novel Boy With Wings is the story of a boy Johnny with strange appendages on his back, who after a series of misfortunes ends up in a freak show traveling the South. There he meets others who are like him but not: a “dog-faced man” seemingly covered in hair; the woman dwarf who runs the show; even a man with the visible arms of his twin in his chest. All have stories to tell, and hardship and trauma they’ve endured due to their uniqueness. Johnny must learn from them and come to grips with himself, to survive and stake out his own place in the world.
Boy With Wings takes place in the 1930s, but sideshows existed from the late 1800s through the end of the 20th century, with a few even still around. The milieu is ripe for interesting conflicts: the “working acts” or cons pressed against oddities of nature; questions of exploitation versus what might be a better life; links to the divine or its opposite for things that seem beyond this world. What does it really mean to be different? Does being gawked at affect your life?
Here are seven novels that dig into the weird in different ways:
Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry
In turn of the century New York, two twins who grew up in their mother’s circus theatre on Coney Island are separated when one disappears. A “night-soiler” who removes ordure from tenement privies finds an abandoned baby. A woman wakes up in an asylum and can’t remember why she’s there. The stories of these four characters weave among each other and intertwine with the “freaks” who formed a part of the original circus show. No one is normal or necessarily what they seem. Can the two sisters reunite? How to escape an asylum in the middle of the East River? Balancing these dilemmas and the change from one century to the next, Parry gives us characters who must lay claim to who they are.
Carnivale of Curiosities by Amiee Gibbs
Sideshows are at their height in Victorian London, and tickets are coveted to The Carnivale of Curiosities and its assembled marvels. The show’s proprietor and illusionist, Aurelius Ashe, is rumored to be more than the average magician, and Lucien the Lucifer, the show’s star attraction, has the ability to create fire.
When a wealthy London banker comes seeking a true miracle for his 23-year old paramour Charlotte, he threatens Ashe with revealing devastating secrets about the carnival and Lucien if he refuses to help. Lucien finds himself drawn to Charlotte, and gothic intrigue settles into the troupe that includes a disappearing juggler, an albino aerialist and more. Faustian bargains are in the works, murder and secrets that if discovered can only hurt.
The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman
“You would think it impossible to find anything new in the world, creatures no man has ever seen before, one-of-a-kind oddities in which nature has taken a backseat to the coursing pulse of the fantastical and the marvellous.” So says Coralie Sardi in Alice Hoffman’s lyrical The Museum of Extraordinary Things. The book’s title is a reference to the museum run on Coney Island in 1911 by Coralie’s father, where she lives above the exhibition. When Coralie turns twelve, she is added to the show, in part because she was born with webbed fingers and toes. Dressed up as a mermaid, she performs in a large water tank.
Coralie meets Eddie Cohen, an immigrant photographer whose photographs of the devastation following the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire embroil him in a mystery behind a young woman’s disappearance. New York itself becomes a character as the book explores what life is like for the exhibitionist, the exploitation involved but also the opportunity, even the thrill of being unique.
The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert
The 1898 Omaha World’s Fair is the setting for this tale of magic and deception. Cecily works in the Midway’s Chamber of Horrors, where she loses her head several times a day playing Marie Antoinette. Ferret is a ventriloquist and con man. Are frauds also freaks? What, after all, is really what it seems?
The book begins with a deflated hot air balloon landing on a house and bringing with it an injured Ferret, now an older man. He recounts to the sisters who find him the dreams and glitter the fair provided, including the oddities shown there—a gay man selling “tonics,” an anarchist selling tasteful “nudies”— and things that he can’t explain, including the complexities of a long, lost love.
Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth Macneal
In 1866 in southern England, Nell is sold by her father to a traveling circus, due to the birthmarks that dot her skin. She becomes the “leopard girl,” and at first the fame and camaraderie with other show members seems a blessing from the shunning she’d experienced in her life before.
As Nell’s fame starts to eclipse that of the showman who bought her, though, trouble ensues. The author shows us that the adoration of the crowds is much more for the spectacle than for the performer herself. Nell must rely on her own inner strength to navigate life and its trials, helped through her relationships with the other women on the show: Stella the bearded woman, Brunette the giantess, and Peggy the dwarf.
The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson by Ellen Baker
Dropped off as a four-year old at a Chicago orphanage in 1924, Cecily Larson waits for her mother to return, but she never does. Cecily is sold as a seven year-old to a traveling circus to perform as a “little sister” to an alluring bareback rider. After a while, though, the glamour of show life begins to fade and crack, and her attraction to a young roustabout throws her life on a dangerous course.
Fast forward to 2015, and Cecily is living a quiet life with her family when a surprise at-home DNA test throws her past life into question. The unexpected results bring to light an odd and tragic past, and secrets that she has long withheld about her time as a girl on the show.
Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham
Yes, there’s the movie (or movies, the 1947 version with Tyrone Power, the 2021 remake with Bradley Cooper), but the book on which they’re based is its own brand of freakishness. This is the sideshow in its essence, featuring true oddities but with the focus more on the working acts: the geek who bites the heads off chickens, the “mentalist” with his fakery, the “pickled punks” pawned off as fetuses. It’s all about the con, and the book is a dark, unforgettable depiction of the “bottom level” of the circus show.
Stanton “Stan” Carlisle is the main character who falls in with the carnival, adapts to its shifting ways, and takes them further when he leaves. Stan seduces and then leaves a number of women as the novel pivots to their points of view, exposing their deception but their desperation (and Stan’s) as well. The life of the author shows a similar downward trajectory, as Gresham dabbled in Marxism, psychoanalysis and Christianity before committing suicide in 1962.
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