Rating: 2 stars

When the good people of Pleasant Hills, Tennessee heard a freak show was coming to town they joked among themselves, but found they were unable to stay away. The Flaherty Brothers Traveling Carnivale and Freakshow may have been old and dilapidated, but it was strangely persuasive and the show they put on would be like nothing the town had ever seen, however they wouldn‘t live to tell about it.

Rather than being run by your average day carnies, Flaherty Brothers is made up of freaks from another world called “The Nothing”. They come in all shapes and sizes, from evil little balloon clowns with razor sharp teeth, pumpkin head people, the ringmaster with stilt-like legs and the two-headed ruler of them all, Miss Monique; who has the ultimate control over the minds of everyone.

Apparently "The Nothing" is dying off and each year the freak show comes to a new town to take the lives of all the townspeople, leaving clones in their place. Why? I have no idea. Between all the gratuitous sex, mindless violence and aimless gore, it’s never really established. I’m trying not to be too hard on the book, as this one of Bryan Smith’s older novels and luckily he has since improved (see the review of Soultaker.)

Freakshow was pretty pointless and one-dimensional. The characters had no depth or real purpose, never giving the reader a reason to care what happened to them. Each character just moved from one situation to another; either killing, torturing or being tortured but never really moving the storyline towards anything solid. The freaks were interesting, but never a focal point; they just seemed to hang out in the background making an appearance every once in a while to wreak havoc, or watching their “pet” human have sex as a form of entertainment. The story had creativity, but no real direction or complexity -- but then again, this is a gore-fest, not a Mensa meeting.
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Mass Market Paperback: 324 pages
Publisher: Leisure Books (February 27, 2007)
ISBN-13: 978-0843958270