Safe Return Doubtful

Scottish Fiction – Published 2024

Is the world ready for another ‘carnie’ novel? Maybe.. but the standard is high.. Nightmare Alley, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Geek Love, The Night Circus, Nights at the Circus, Swamplandia!… and though readable, this doesn’t make the grade.

Set in Scotland in the 1990s, this tells of a strange circus, the Freakslaw, thats descends on a rural town, bringing with it the weird and the bizarre. Amongst the entourage are a drag artist, co-joined twins of different genders, and a fortune teller and her daughter, a contortionist, who are both witches. The characters of the circus, and those encountered in the town, are broken in some way, and much darker than they appear at first.

Intentionally, the novel rubs up against society norms much in the same way that Geek Love did, but stops short of entering horror, or fantasy, territory. There is also a need for Flett to be more politically sensitive than those who went before, though to her credit she circumnavigates this quite well.

Ultimately though, it just isn’t as entertaining as I hoped it would be. Its an experimental piece of writing, that is worth the time to read, though owes much to those that went before…

My GoodReads score 3 / 5