Underneath the eloquence a shocking description about an immoral passion of a monster. Whatever Humbert Humbert claims, his twisted picture of the girl isn't reality. He's filling in the gaps himself and imagining something there is not, forcing the reader to see Lo with his eyes. How much of the story is actually true? The writing is superb, it's only hinting the surroundings but tells us so much. Nabokov's use of words and allusions is in fact so brilliant, that you can't help but have this constant nagging feeling that you should actually feel sorry for Humbert.

Having read Naked Lunch, I thought I had been sucked into an alternate universe when I saw this in the library. I don't usually grab random stuff when I'm there, but this just seemed too weird to pass. Turns out, this was pretty - blah. Not particularly moving, meditativeness wasn't that interesting, and overall pretty forgettable. Although I did enjoy Burroughs's style, which didn't make this your run-of-the-mill mushy book about cats, but kind of a dream-like journey.

If I hadn't had a crippling flu, I would have read this on one sitting. Tryon conjures up a sympathetic small town, whose residents drink cola during a heat wave, and where kids run around in the fields and vegetable sellers drive trucks. The oppressive feeling doesn't just come from the heat though, but from the weird relationship of the twins and especially from Holland's behaviour. Actually, the twins' appearance kind of reminds me of Village of the Damned (1960).

After two thirds of the book there was a major surprise, which almost got me to choke on my toast. I just stared at the words for a while, because I hadn't experienced a mindfuck like that for a long time in a book. Surprises don't always work for everyone, but I have a feeling this will. I needed to turn back the pages a bit to see if any hints were given, but you wouldn't know that thing beforehand because the reader's focus is on other stuff.

As far as the horror aspect goes, this focuses strongly on psychological horror. A certain image got stuck in my head, and it can't be erased no matter how much I want. The atmosphere is therefore created from mental images, mood and the quality of the reader's imagination.

BBC Radio 7

A strange and fascinating set of characters that Dunn has brought to life remarkably well, suffers a little from the ending and the frame story. However, that doesn't diminish the fact that this right here is what I'm looking for from circus books. At times I felt a little sick in my stomach which doesn't happen very often. What I truly loved in this world of freaks, smell of popcorn, extremely vivid characters and nauseating scenarios, was that this is ultimately a tale about what it means to be human. It contemplates and challenges our society norms and how we're used to view it from a certain point of view. Do physically different people disgust us and do we want to marginalize them, because they remind us about our inner deformities?