The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney

A charming and satiric fantasy. Dr. Lao's circus pulls into the dusty little town of Abalone, Arizona, beguiling the jaded residents with impossible creatures and tapping into their deepest dreams and desires. Published in 1935, Finney's book is escapist entertainment, but with a particular bite. The residents are, for the most part singularly unimpressed with the parade of chimeras, satyrs, sea serpents, hermaphrodites and unicorns.


Dr. Lao is a stereotypical eastern sage, speaking in an appropriately musical Charlie Chan voice, herein exasperated with a family of skeptics:

"Whatsah mattah? You tink someblody makeum fool allah time. I no fool you. You come this place looky look; you looky look. By Glod, I no charge you nothing. You go in flor nothing; takeum whole dam family flor nothing. You see: I no fool you. This place no catchum fake. This my show, by Glod!"

But falling into carney-speak when the mood strikes:

"Don't be foolin' with that animal, mister..."

While the men attend a risque tent show, the town Lonelyhearts consults Apollonius of Tyana for a fortunetelling session, a session in which, at wit's end at the woman's persistence, the oracle is forced to give it to her straight:

"Well, I paid you, read my future."

"Tomorrow will be like today, and the day after tomorrow will be like day before yesterday," said Apollonius. "I see your remaining days each as quiet, tedious collections of hours. You will not travel anywhere. You will think no new thoughts. You will experience no new passions. Older you will become but not wiser. Stiffer but not more dignified. Childless you are, and childless you shall remain. Of that suppleness you once commanded in your youth, of that strange simplicity which once attracted a few men to you, neither endures, nor shall you recapture any of them anymore. People will talk to you and visit with you out of sentiment or pity, not because you have anything to offer them. Have you ever seen an old cornstalk turning brown, dying, but refusing to fall over, upon which stray birds alight now and then, hardly remarking what it is they perch on? That is you. I cannot fathom your place in life's economy. A living thing should either create or destroy according to its capacity and caprice, but you, you do neither. You only live on dreaming of the nice things you would like to have happen to you but which never happen; and you wonder vaguely why the young lives about you which you occasionally chide for a fancied impropriety never listen to you and seem to flee at your approach. When you die you will be buried and forgotten and that is all. The morticians will enclose you in a worm-proof casket, thus sealing even unto eternity the clay of your uselessness. And for all the good or evil, creation or destruction, that your living might have accomplished, you might just as well has never lived at all. I cannot see the purpose in such a life. I can see in it only vulgar, shocking waste."

"I thought you said you didn't evaluate lives", snapped Mrs. Cassan.

The evening ends in a an impossible phantasmagoria under the bigtop, with a full scale sacrificial ritual to the great god Yottle complete with virgins, a spectacular from which the townsfolk file out and home to bed, to rest and rise another day.

Finney supplies a detailed and hilarious appendix cataloging in minute detail the residents of the town, the beasts, and the questions and contradictions in the book that pass unresolved. The Bison Books edition includes the wonderful illustrations by the appropriately exotically named Boris Artzybasheff. Terrific fun.