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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Freaks, gore, and clowns! A winning combination!, May 24, 2007
This review is from: The Freakshow (Mass Market Paperback)
With each successive book, Bryan Smith unleashes just a little bit more of the madness. House of Blood, while a nice read, skipped over the juicy parts. Deathbringer, with his deadly and dead sexy character Melinda, gave us a glimpse of the horrors awaiting to come out of Bryan's mind. Finally, with The Freakshow, he displays a carnival of horrors that would make Jack Ketchum to take notice.
Soon after the nasty events of Deathbringer, disaster strikes another small Tennessee town. This disaster? A circus of freaks. There's a little bit of everything thrown into the plot...politics, science fiction, government conspiracies. Bryan does a nice job keeping these elements on the fringe, plot points that are important, but best kept an arm's length away to keep the focus on the action.
Having read all three of Bryan Smith's novels, I can say with certainty that his strongest talent as a writer is creating demented "bad guys." He's in top form here, with one of the creepiest and most effective villains I've encountered in sometime: Miss Monique. She's able to create orgasmic pleasure and perverse, unbearable pain all at once via mind control. Oh, she's also got a hag head.
There are a few quibbles to be had with The Freakshow. The book comes to a rushing halt via a plot contrivance that was a bit too convenient. The story's narrative is split between two characters (Mike & Heather), and I just couldn't get the sympathy stirring for Heather despite some of the horrific things that happened to her.
Not a perfect book, but man, it is one you'll remember for a long time.
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14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rapid-fire gore fest with out-of-the-ordinary freaks, April 10, 2007
This review is from: The Freakshow (Mass Market Paperback)
Brain eating, pistols, shotguns, carving, mutilation, blood, gore galore, mind control, psychotic mutant clowns, living machines ... and yeah, freaks! The Flaherty Brothers Traveling Carnivale and Freakshow has come to Pleasant Hills, and small town America will never be the same again.
Smith's book takes off immediately at a madcap pace with nonstop terror, cliffhangers, and intense scenes, like a wild roller coaster ride from first to last page. After dumping boyfriend Craig at the side of the road, will Heather be able to save her mother Alice? What grisly events are in store for Craig? Will Mike, cowering in fear at the Freakshow, be able to make good his escape?
'The Freakshow' can easily be visualized as a gore-fest horror movie, moving from one gruesome scene to the next with terrifying velocity. The Freakshow didn't come to town to entertain, it came to absorb.
Bryan Smith is an upcoming writer to watch. 'The Freakshow' is his third novel. While the prose remains simplistic in style, his imagination certainly runs on the wilder, gorier side of horror. 'The Freakshow' is not for the weak of stomach. If you're a fan of horror, or a fan of freaks, 'The Freakshow' won't disappoint that slimy part of your brain that squirms with pleasure at the icky. Enjoy!
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Welcome to Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium... Uh, I mean The Flaherty Brothers Traveling Carnivale and Freakshow!, July 17, 2008
This review is from: The Freakshow (Mass Market Paperback)
Stop me if you've heard this one before: A carnival arrives in a small town. Bad stuff happens.
I'd tried Bryan Smith's first book House Of Blood twice but quit because I didn't like the writing much. I decided to try The Freakshow to see if he'd gotten better. Well, The Freakshow is much better written than House Of Blood. That being said it still had a boatload of problems.
Bryan Smith seems to be growing into a very good writer. Some bits of this book were very powerfully written. I had some issues with the writing style, but overall it really gripped me. The problem is that he is still pretty uneven. When he's good, he's quite good. Then he would write bits of narration such as: "He freaked" and "His eyes bugged out." Maybe I'm just old, but slangy stuff like that should be reserved for characters to say or think. It makes the author seem like a teenager himself when it shows up as narration.
His characters were pretty devoid of character. You can see he's going for the Jack Ketchum/ Edward Lee type of gut-wrenching horror here and his writing almost pulls it off. The problem is the characters weren't well written enough to make you care. All were pretty flat, stock horror movie types that it was tough to feel much for. Without believable characters this type of horror isn't nearly as effective.
Still, I didn't mind the on again/off again writing and flat characters. What really got me was the... senselessness of the story. It never really felt like it flowed together to tell a story. Instead it felt like it was just meandering its way between pointless (though sometimes very well written) scenes until a quickie wrap-up brought things to a close. Bryan Smith has the makings of a good writer, but he isn't yet a good storyteller. I got the sense that he knew what he was trying to say, but just wasn't very clear in conveying it to us. Lots of unexplained things happened that never really went anywhere. What was the deal with the guy in the woods for instance? Was he related to the carnival? I dunno. I guess so.
He really could stand to polish up his skills with foreshadowing and pacing. Stephen King is a master of this. Bryan Smith is not. New plot twists would just clumsily plop in out of nowhere. Things were kinda-sorta-mostly explained at the end, but it was hundreds of pages of stuff that felt arbitrary and unconnected only to be suddenly (and very clumsily) wrapped up in the end by a character telling what happened. He needs to work on weaving the details into the context of the story, revealing a little at a time rather than the 'Presto!' approach used here.
I'm kind of hung on a final decision here. I finished this one, but towards the end it felt like I was grinding through just to complete it. Still, I will pick up his future books to see where he goes. If he can get his storytelling up to par with his writing, he will really be something.
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