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.”

Graphic Content: Love Everlasting Volume 2 written by Tom King and illustrated by Elsa Charettier

 

People might be familiar with the book Love Everlasting, Vol. 1, written by Tom King and illustrated by Elsa Charretier (I also hope that it’s because you read the review I did for volume 1). It focuses on Joan Peterson, a woman who finds herself living out the plotlines of several romantic stories, being everything from a maid pining for her employer to a secretary who desires her best friend’s fiancée. In all these scenarios, once she supposedly finds love, she is whisked away Quantum-Leap-style to a new romance plot, and if she doesn’t fall in line and live out the story she’s in, a mysterious cowboy shows up to kill her and she respawns into a different romance plot. I was unsure how Volume 2 of Love Everlasting could add anything new to the story. It doesn’t add any details to Joan’s predicament, but it does show a wrinkle to the rules of her existence.

The scenario of Joan needing to find love to escape must still play out for her in Volume 2, even if finding that love takes a while. (Here’s where I should probably put a SPOILER ALERT for those who want to read the story and be totally surprised). In 1963, party girl Joan finds herself in a relationship with square-jawed, strait-laced Don, but Joan actually goes through an entire life with Don, from getting married and having kids to becoming a grandmother and spending her old age alone. Though Charretier’s artwork still pays homage to silver age romance comics, King’s story here is quite a change from the last volume where Joan is constantly trying to find her footing in a new universe. In this, she is trying to figure out if this world she finds herself in is real, especially now that she has created beings she should love unconditionally.

One could almost see this stop on Joan’s journey as a glimmer of hope, even if it’s a false one. Even as she starts to look at the flaws of this world, she still can’t help but want to stay because of the life she’s created here not necessarily with Don but with her children and grandchildren. Volume one apparently sets up the premise of this universe while volume 2 offers a story of what happens to Joan when her escape hatch no longer works, seemingly arguing that it’s crueler to allow Joan to have hope, even if it’s a false hope, that she can remain indefinitely in wherever she lands.

 

Have You Read This? You've Lost a Lot of Blood by Eric LaRocca

 From horror classics like Frankenstein and Dracula to Joe Hill’s “Twittering (or is it Tweeting) at the Circus of the Dead,” the epistolary technique has been used in horror to generate terror. It is both a peak over the shoulder of the main character as they write, record, or blast out on the Internet their innermost thoughts while also forcing the reader to piece together all the notes, letters, entries, etc. to figure out what exactly is going on. Once the final note, journal entry, etc. is read and the last puzzle piece snaps into place, then the reader can be rightly horrified by the entire picture. For example, Eric LaRocca’s latest work, You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood, can be a story within a story, but it is also much more ambitious than that description.

The novel is basically a critique of the work of Martyr Black, a writer who has a penchant for describing murders he may or may not have committed in enough graphic detail that lends people to believe he knows murder intimately. While there are many diary entries, transcripts of recordings, and even attempts at poetry by Martyr Black, there is the novel he’s written, also titled, “You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood,” that runs through the entire work like an infected thread in a sutured wound. The story in that book is about a programmer who, while caring for her younger brother, takes a job that requires her to complete a game that just might be cursed.

What brims in Black’s story is a story that’s plenty scary and gruesome on its own, with loads of body horror and family trauma. But LaRocca’s work also looks at some very metafictive questions, such as what does an artist’s work, whether intentional or not, reveal about that artist. There are moments in the book that seem to be real snippets of Black’s life, but the novel and poetry within may be just as revealing. It’s a book that somehow manages to be both a tale about the loss of identity and a character study that tries to paint a very bloody picture of who Black is. If readers like a puzzle and don’t mind (losing) a lot of blood, then they should attempt to know Martyr Black.