TITLE: The Pilo Family Circus
A NOVEL by Will Elliott
PUBLICATION DATE: August 2008
EDITION: Hardcover
COVER ART: Chris Roberts
PRINT RUN: 500 signed by Will Elliott
INTRODUCTION: John Berlyne
ISBN: 978-906301-97-2
SYNOPSIS:
Somewhere just above the searing flames of hell, The Pilo Family Circus is playing at a town near you. This darkest of carnivals has preyed on the souls of its audience for centuries and young Jamie has unfortunately just come to the attention of the star turns—the baddest, most psychotic clown troupe you could never hope to meet. What's more, they want him to join up and these are not the kind of folks who take no for an answer.
“The Pilo Family Circus” starts in Brisbane, Australia, but then moves into an imaginary space, somewhere outside of our reality, where the Circus of the title has its home and puts on shows to regular people called “tricks” who believe they are going to a regular circus performance. Once you are a member of the Circus, it’s for life, and since time inside the Circus grounds passes differently than on Earth, your life may be a really long one, if not a happy or enjoyable one.
The masters of the Circus are the diabolical and sadistic Kurt Pilo Jr., and his cowardly brother George who delights in mischief while trying to kill Kurt so he can lead the show himself. Always hovering in the background, the Pilo brothers possess the power to grant life, pain, death or passes to the “real world” over every one in the Circus.
In the Circus itself, there are bitter rivalries between various performers—most notably between the Acrobats and the Clowns, and the magician Mugambo and the seer Shalice—and the lengths to which one side or the other will go to score a point provides much of the novel’s black humor and tension.
Our main character in the book is Jamie, a young man working dead end jobs in Brisbane and living in a shared apartment with dubious friends, who gets recruited as the sixth clown JJ for the Pilo Circus. Of course, Jamie does not want this ‘honor’, but the leader of the clowns and his sidekicks (Gonko and the twins Doopy & Goshy) make Jamie an offer he literally cannot refuse after a thorough trashing of his apartment, almost blowing up his workplace, and other similar niceties.
