PUBLISHER: Jove, 1980
GENRE: Fiction/Contemporary horror
SETTING: Ohio, USA mostly
WIKI: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B
FROM PUBLISHER: Young Amy Harper is the most beautiful girl at her school, but to her life seems wretched. Terrorized by her mother, Amy's little brother Joey is her only real friend. Their mother's days are regulated by religious obsession, and nights by the bottle and drunken confessions.
When the carnival comes to town, Joey plans to escape his troubled home and join the revellers. But Amy and Joey fall under the carnival spell, unaware that their mother's secrets are buried here and that vengeance for past deeds lies in wait for them in the make-believe world of . . . the Funhouse.
MY THOUGHTS & SPOILERS: Let me start with the obvious; this is a horror novel, therefore not much in it's believable. Having said that and considering the author, according to him, didn't have a whole lot to work with since the screenplay "offered enough material for no more than 10% or 20% of a novel", he did a damn good job creating a whole lot of horrifying backstory, and backstory is what makes up the first 2/3 of this novel. As soon as I started reading the prologue and first few chapters I noticed how different the story was from the film. It wasn't until the novel was over and I read the afterword and what Dean had to say about the screenplay being what it was that I understood why it was so different. He said he didn't even use the screenplay until he was 4/5 into writing the story. The last third of the novel is when Amy and her three friends arrive at the carnival when in the film that takes place just a few minutes in.
Amy is the main character. She's a seventeen-year-old high school senior and she's in a dilemma. On top of that she broke up with her boyfriend. He's truly an awful character and he wasn't in the story for too long.
Ellen is her forty-five-year old mother. Her being an alcoholic religious fanatic wasn't in the film but we see lots of it in the novel. Ellen grew up with a mother who was like that. Ellen did a bad thing when she was a young adult in 1955, and her ex-husband Conrad's out to get revenge on any children she may have had after they divorced, though their marriage was never legal in the first place.
Joey is Amy's ten-year-old brother. He wants to run away because he's sick of his drunken mother, who goes into his bedroom some nights and talks to him about something bad she's done in her past and she thinks he's asleep and can't hear her. I don't really see much point to having him in the film or novel since he doesn't really do much for either.
Liz is a horrible character. She's the same age as Amy and is a big slut with aspirations of going to Nevada to become a legal prostitute. She's got one vulgar mouth and I was glad to see her go. She's nothing like this in the film. Her death in the book is a little more graphic.
Conrad is fifty-two and owns the funhouse part of the traveling carnival and two concession stands. The carnival stays in Florida early November-April, then they travel the U.S. during the rest of the months. He's a mean, violent, disturbed person and a Satanist. Something awful happened in his childhood that I'm sure really screwed him up mentally.
Gunther is the son of Conrad and Zena and he works with them in the funhouse, dressed like Frankenstein. He's retarded(?), violent, and deformed though a physical description of his face isn't really given, and he's around twenty-four years old.
Zena is the forty-three-year old phony fortune teller that travels with them, and she's Conrad's ex-wife. They married in 1955 just a couple months after his divorce from Ellen, and she was only eighteen. Zena and Gunther aren't related in the film which is great because she gives him a handjob that he pays for.
Conrad appears to be Gunther's father in the film though it's never once said because he says to him, "I wish I had wrung your ugly neck the day you were born", as if he'd seen him right after birth, like a parent. The bad deed that Ellen did twenty-five years ago is referenced briefly towards the end when Gunther and Conrad are alone in the basement and Conrad's loading his gun. If you haven't read the book you won't have a clue what his comment means, "It's real hard, ever since your mamma.....Your little brother Tad/Todd over there on display like..." I had to crank the volume way up to even hear that.
Once Amy and her friends get to the funhouse there aren't many similarities to the film aside from the murders and most of those are a little if not a lot different. They didn't even plan to spend the night in the funhouse either like they did in the film.
Two evil people are on the loose at the carnival. One hides the horrors of the other to protect him, even goes so far as to hide bodies for him. The book also has more murders than the film. The timespan is only about a month or less, May-June. The film takes place in one night.
I've always liked the film but since having read the book and seeing how much more the author added to the story, it's pretty boring. The only thing I can say I truly like in the film, and this isn't in the book, is how the four kids are spying through the slats in the wooden floor at some people who are in the the room beneath it. I like the death of Gunther in the novel more than in the film. It's more gruesome than getting electrocuted.
Amy's brother Joey is in the book a little more during the killings at the funhouse. The deaths are out of order and methods are different.
PUBLISHER: Scholastic, 10/1992
