You have two days to pass your audition. You better pass it, feller. You're joining the circus. Ain't that the best news you ever got?
When a bizarre incident on the road triggers a nightmarish chain of events, Jamie finds himself plunged into the horrific alternate universe that is the centuries-old Pilo Family Circus, a borderline world between hell and earth from which humankind's greatest tragedies have been perpetrated.
Yet in this place peopled by the gruesome, grotesque and monstrous, where violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself - for when he applies the white face paint, he is transformed into JJ, the most vicious clown of all. And JJ wants Jamie dead . . .
as much surreal poetry as macabre thrills . . . this is
a first novel of real promise. At his best, Elliott writes with a power commensurate with the originality of his vision. It is not just that he has unusually nasty visions to put on the page but he has the ability to make us share them
