A desperate boy escapes his abusive home by joining a carnival and is drawn into a dark conspiracy in this tale by “a master storyteller” (Kurt Vonnegut). Though only eight years old, little Horton “Horty” Bluett has known a lifetime of sadness. Tormented and abused by his adoptive family, he’s had enough–and with a beloved broken toy he calls “Junky” as his sole companion, the desperate little … desperate little boy runs away to join a carnival. There, among the fortune tellers, fire-eaters, sideshow freaks, and assorted “strange people,” Horty hopes to find acceptance and, at long last, a real home. But disgraced doctor Pierre “Maneater” Monetre’s traveling show is no ordinary entertainment, and its performers are not what they appear to be. The Maneater has sinister plans for the world that go far beyond fleecing unsuspecting rubes and other easy marks–a dark and terrible scheme that requires unleashing the extraterrestrial power of the dreaming jewels, and the unwitting assistance of a young boy who may be far more remarkable than he’s ever imagined.
The full-length debut by Theodore Sturgeon, a legendary writer who won Nebula and Hugo Awards and authored such classics as More Than Human, this journey into a circus of shadows is “an intensely written and very moving novel of love and retribution” (The Washington Star).
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Theodore Sturgeon including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the University of Kansas’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library and the author’s estate, among other sources.
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The poetry that exudes from every sentence of this strange bildungsroman. Highly influential on my impressionable young self. As all Sturgeon’s writings were.
“They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high school stadium and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He’d been doing it for years.”
Come with me back to 1971. I know it’s a scarily long time ago, and many of you weren’t even born, but picture a wee Scots …
A good story as read in this day and age. It must have been minding when it was first published.
Sturgeon has a distinctive style that gets into strange threads of human behavior and mind games. Very interesting, intriguing and engaging story.