Review: "The Funhouse" by Dean Koontz

The Funhouse was a paperback original published in 1980 as by Owen West. A pseudonym Dean Koontz used for this novel and again for The Mask (1981). It’s based on the screenplay for the not-so-good film directed by Tobe Hooper, but it doesn’t feel like a novelization. Its plotting is that of a novel rather than a fleshed-out screenplay and the carnival settings are fully developed and perfectly ominous. It marked Koontz’s first appearance on The New York Times bestseller list and it’s also one of Koontz’s few straight horror novels.
      Ellen Harper is young and beautiful. She married a carny, Conrad Straker, to escape her domineering mother and quickly became pregnant. Her child is abnormal. Its growth rate is phenomenal, and it is ugly beyond Ellen’s understanding. She believes the infant is trying to murder her, and on a stormy August night she kills her baby in self-defense. Conrad goes mad with grief and sends Ellen away with an oath of revenge. The years pass, Ellen remarries and has two more children. A girl, Amy, who is a senior in high school and a young son named Joey. It has been two decades since Conrad sent Ellen away, but he is still seeking his justice. A vengeance coming close as his circus moves into Ellen’s new hometown.
      Compared with Koontz’s more recent work, The Funhouse is simple – the plot is more linear (in a good way) and there are fewer complications – but it is pure fun. The carnival setting is exciting and scary at once. Straker is a perfect over-the-top evil antagonist with his single-minded obsession to hurt Ellen. But the best part is the carny lore woven into the narrative. A marriage is completed when a man and woman ride together on a carousel. The divorce is finalized by riding the carousel alone, backwards. The Funhouse is an example of why Koontz was so popular in the 1980s, and if I could make a wish, it would be that he had written a few more straight horror tales.

Here are a few of my favorite genre novels set in and around circuses and carnivals: Nightmare Alley, by William Lindsay Gresham, Ride the Pink Horse, by Dorothy B. Hughes, Blood and Circuses, by Kerry Underwood, The Dead Man: Carnival of Death by Bill Crider, Catch a Falling Clown, by Stuart M. Kaminsky, Funland, by Richard Laymon, Twilight Eyes, by Dean Koontz, and Joyland, by Stephen King.     Do you have any favorite circus stories?