Have You Read This? I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House by Ben Farthing

 

One of my favorite things about horror is how, no matter how far out there the premise is, one is still able to tell an emotionally resonant story. Add vampires, add vampire musicians, or add vampire hunting musicians hunting vampire musicians; readers of horror can afford to have their suspension of disbelief stretched to its limit if they feel the emotions being portrayed are authentic. One such example of this is the writings of Ben Farthing. My wife had recently purchased two of his books for me as a Christmas present. While I liked the nutty nostalgia-laced horror in I Found Puppets Living in My Apartment Walls, my mind comes back more often to his more emotionally relevant I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House.

The book is a quick read but it packs quite the emotional punch, despite its seemingly light premise. Proud dad Dave is hiking in the woods behind his house with his four-year-old son Jacob when both father and son make a fascinating discovery: somehow, a circus tent has appeared on Dave’s property. Dave at first doesn’t know what to do about such an oddity near his home and Jacob seemingly doesn’t want anything to do with the house, but all it takes for the two to become prisoners of the tent is to approach it. What began as a mere curiosity for Dave becomes a fight to escape a tent that seems to swell beyond the size of most tents, as though it somehow exists outside the boundaries of time and space.

Once father and son are trapped inside the tent, all sorts of seemingly impossible occurrences and monstrosities try to keep them from leaving. Dave is not only struggling to find a way out but he is trying to keep Jacob relatively calm and not have him break down in a way that would impede their escape. Much of the emotional weight of this story is in Dave questioning his own fitness as a parent and the end of the book provides a surprising knife in the gut for both Dave and the readers who, like Dave, wonder if they are really a good parent. How the book ends won’t give readers a sense of relief as it gives them a chance to say, “At least I’m not Dave.”