Disposable Lit Reviews

Onyx Books, 1990
397 pp.
ISBN 0-451-40182-4
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Why do carnivals and amusement parks show up so often in horror novels and movies?

I think it has to do with the uncompromising artifice of the carnival. There’s nothing more contrived, more obviously a facade, than a carnival. From the fiberglass and plywood hiding the gears and hydraulics of the rides, to the greasepaint and wigs hiding the anonymous people inside the clown costumes, it’s all a masquerade. And we try so consciously to buy into it. We pretend not to see the peeling paint or the surly operators, hear the slight grind in the gears, smell the vomit in the bushes beside the Tilt-A-Whirl. We want to believe. We want to buy into the spectacle and glitter that camouflages the cheap reality. We try so hard to ignore the reality and accept only the facade.

And anything we try so hard to ignore becomes scary because of that denial. The darkness gets darker when he turn our backs on it.

Of course, once you’ve got the unsettling backdrop, you still need to build a story that uses it and capitalizes on it instead of squandering it. Laymon does do and does it well.

The amusement park in question is Funland, on the ocean front of a small California town. The dark side may be a little more apparent than in most other parks, because it’s a favorite stomping ground for homeless people — or, as the locals call them, “trolls.” The place is in fact crawling with them, asking for handouts, rummaging in garbage, jibbering to themselves and passersby. They’re dirty, they’re disturbing, they’re even moderately annoying, but they’re mostly harmless. Mostly.

Teen Jeremy has just moved to town, and in an effort to make friends he falls in with a group of teens that style themselves “trollers.” Led by breathtaking beauty Tanya, a lifeguard who was gangraped and scarred by trolls the previous year, they assemble at night on the deserted boardwalk, luring trolls out to brutalize them and warn the others. Each time, they leave a calling-card: “Greetings from Great Big Billy Goat Gruff.” Locals are divided and conflicted by the reports of trolling; many approve of cleaning up the park, though just about everyone worries, consciously or unconsciously, that the violence will escalate and sooner or later someone will end up dead.

Also in the mix are two cops, Dave and Joan, whose beat on the boardwalk brings them into contact with both elements, and Robin, a young banjo-playing vagabond close to being a troll in the eyes of the trollers. And things don’t get better when Nate, Tanya’s boyfriend who’s become disillusioned with the brutality of trolling, takes a protective liking to her.

Laymon paints an engaging portrait of the conflicts of desire and anger, largely through the eyes of hesitant Jeremy, whose teenage lust and need for acceptance pushes him to a more and more cauterized conscience. But this is not entirely a story of “good kid gone bad over a girl”; the trolls are no hapless victims. There’s something sinister about them as a whole, somehow centering on the closed-down freakshow at the center of Funland…

I often find on-supernatural horror novels lacking in real dread and atmosphere, because what’s hiding in the shadows is completely understood (usually a whackjob with an axe). But Funland uses that carnival air to keep the dread larger than life, cranking the suspence tighter and tighter until violence erupts and keeps erupting. We’re not talking about “splatterpunk” here, where gore starts at the first page and doesn’t let up; instead, the jeopardy has been so well established that the brutal effect of the violence is focused and heartstopping. Laymon doesn’t overload the novel with violence — but when he uses it, he doesn’t pull his punches.

Laymon’s writing style doesn’t have that charismatic quality that Stephen King’s has, but it’s much better than the mechanistic pot-boiler effect of Dean Koontz. (No, you don’t need to e-mail me to tell me how wrong I am about Koontz. We’ll just call it even, okay?) Rather than crank out more dime-a-dozen “something creepy in a small town” paperbacks with embossed covers and little to recommend them, someone would do well to put this one back into print.

Nathan Shumate