SERPENT GIRL, by Matthew Carnahan (Villard; $19.95)
Matthew Carnahan’s first book speaks for itself, and very little a reviewer can say about it comes anywhere near to matching its hilarious power and flat-out originality. Bailey Quinn, at 22 a college dropout making a precarious living stealing motorcycles and other large-ticket items from stores that claim them on their insurance, stumbles on a newspaper want ad for a circus worker which changes his future. “In just a few words, it evoked a life on the road, free from crime, college, family, all the moorings that held me in my steady fog of chronic ennui,” he says.
Bailey gets hired on to “the last big-top tent circus to tour the country, and one of the last to have a freak show. It had become illegal in certain states, so the Freaks had a lot of time off… [They] pretty much stuck together and didn’t go outside their group for sport… every once in a while one of them would shoot another one. They hardly ever died and the police never came. These people were hotwired to be nasty; they completely contradicted the notion that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”
But one of those Freaks is Eelie, “the Limbless Lady, or as her longer professional moniker proclaimed, ‘Serpent Girl!... Eelie, the Limbless Lady! She glides, she writhes, she crawls on her belly like a human snake!’ Eelie’s act was a big draw. Her husband, Arnold, went by Captain Flame and had a sparsely attended fire act. Arnold needed Eelie…she was, among other things, a wicked online stock trader… you’d see her head bobbing up and down on the keyboard, using her tongue and her nose to make the trade.”
Bailey is as intrigued by Eelie’s sexual favors as he is by her stock trading skills. She teaches him secrets about both, without for a second (well, maybe just for one second) slipping over that portentous border of circus freaks as metaphors for human weirdness that have served writers like William Lindsay Gresham (“Nightmare Alley”) and such film makers as Tod Browning (“Freaks”). And when Eelie and her fellow Freaks take shameless advantage of Quinn’s basic innocence, even he gets the joke. The black fun never flags, and Carnahan has the verbal juice to keep it flowing.
PASHAZADE, by Jon Courtnay Grimwood (Bantam Spectra; $12).
Readers in England are already entranced by Jon Courtnay Grimwood’s “Arabesk” series which mixes old-fashioned noir, science fiction and alternative history. Now Americans can share in the thoughtful thrills, as in the first book in the series a mysterious hero called Ahraf (“Zee Zee” to his friends) Bey—who might be the heir to a famous family, but who has also done time in an American prison—is summoned back to a North African city called El Iskandryia and is almost immediately accused of murder. Grimwood’s imagination and the lively originality of his writing makes this an intriguing enterprise.
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