I'm sharing a fun book with you today, released just in time for the spooky season! What's even more fun, is it also celebrates the 250th anniversary of the circus!
Check out this collection of flash fiction, featuring vaudeville stories of the weird, absurd and bizarre cabaret. Step right up to meet a woman so determined to be a star, she'll try anything! There's also a guest post by the author Nancy Stohlman, where she talks about why she thinks people enjoy taboo and oddly grotesque things.
Check it out, and be sure to drop a comment and share the post with anyone who enjoys odd stories! =D
Madam Velvet's Cabaret of Oddities
~Author: Nancy Stohlman
~Length: 101 Pages
~Released: October 5th, 2018
Step right up and meet a woman so determined to be a star she’ll try anything, including spray on Instant Fame! Meet her reflection, who dreams of a life of her own and manages to find love on the Internet! See the man desperately trying to earn a world record in the most bizarre way possible! Learn the origins of the Four-Legged Woman and the Human Skeleton! Clown mothers, suicidal ringmasters, cult leader who teach the cha-cha and Alaska Jackson’s Traveling Medicine Show…each one takes center stage in this vaudeville of flash fiction. Flash fiction, microfiction, short-short stories… regardless of the name, it’s all the same—a compressed story that packs a punch. Enter a cabaret of the weird, the absurd, and the bizarre with this bold and bawdy new collection.
Nancy Stohlman is the author of the flash collections Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (forthcoming 2018), The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), the flash novels The Monster Opera (2013) and Searching for Suzi (2009), and three anthologies of flash fiction including Fast Forward: The Mix Tape (2010), which was a finalist for a 2011 Colorado Book Award. She is the creator and curator of The Fbomb Flash Fiction Reading Series, the creator of FlashNano in November, and her work has been published in over 100 journals and anthologies including the forthcoming Norton anthology New Microfictions (2018). She lives in Denver and teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder.
When she is not writing flash fiction she straps on stilettos and becomes the lead singer of the lounge metal jazz trio Kinky Mink. She dreams of one day becoming a pirate.
~ Connect with Nancy Online ~
The Odd, Grotesque and Taboo—Why We Can’t Look Away
By Nancy Stohlman
A few years ago, I went to the Freak Circus show on Venice Beach in California (I’ve been told it’s closed now). They had a variety of acts—from The Sword Swallower who doubled as The Fire Eater to The Rubber Woman who could spin her arm in the socket to a man with a congenital deformity that left his body covered in golf-ball sized tumors. When he took off his shirt he told us to look.
Look, he said. See me.
Why do we look? Or look away? And why do we want to look? Why does this--the odd, the taboo--fascinate us so much? We've been told it's not polite to stare, but that message is at odds with our natural curiosity to see what is different. So we are forced to create freak shows and other opportunities to stare with impunity, a dirty little secret we share between the looker and the seen.
When I began research for my new flash fiction collection, Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities, which is an homage to the bizarre—clown mothers and suicidal ringmasters and a reflection who has run off with a can of Instant Fame--my favorite discoveries were the stories of the actual people who were once a part of the vaudeville circuit. There were familiar characters like the Bearded Lady and the Little People, and popular shows like the Four-Legged Woman, but there were also other “oddities” we might not find so odd today, like The Tattooed Man, the Strong Man (with bulging muscles) and the Long-Haired Lady (with hair to the floor).
In one part of my book, I retell and reimagine the real stories of these old vaudevillians. And while I fictionalize much of what I write, the kernels of truth remain, as in these stories:
The Human Skeleton
Art Ward was a normal kid until the age of 14 when he began to rapidly lose weight. The doctors could not explain it, calling it some unknown wasting disease. As an adult, unable to keep a job, he finally joined the circus sideshow as The Human Skeleton.
Art was not the only Human Skeleton act but he was the most notorious. Known for his carousing and womanizing, he allegedly tried to leave the circus many times, but his gambling debts always forced him to return. At the time of his death he weighed 43 pounds.
Flea Circus
The first man to harness a flea was a watchmaker in 1509, who used them to demonstrate the inner mechanisms of a watch. By the 1800s, fleas were regularly fitted with permanent gold wires around their necks and attached to tiny circus rides such as chariots, carousels or Ferris wheels. When the fleas jumped they “moved” the contraptions. Sometimes the fleas were glued to the circus ring holding tiny instruments and the floor was heated. As the fleas struggled to escape they appeared to “play” the instruments.
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Some of the more disturbing internet rabbit holes I went down were real leper colonies and an actual exhibit at the Bronx Zoo called “The Missing Link”, where tribal people from Africa were exhibited next to monkeys.
Maybe we like to think we have come a long way since those days. Thankfully the Bronx Zoo exhibit was shut down after two days, and no longer would we consider the Tattooed Man or the Strong Man a true anomaly worth paying to see. But our desire to look is still there. Today’s vaudeville circuit might contain a different cast of characters: The Man with the Split Tongue! Girl with Silicon Breasts! The Man with the Removeable Leg! A Woman with Face Lift! The 700-Pound Man! ADHD Boy! We are still voyeurs, only taboos have changed.
Recently I did a reading at Spoken Word Paris and had picked “Circus/Carnival” for the evening’s theme. And to everyone’s surprise a woman with blue hair showed up to perform during the open mic. A little person with blue hair. A comedian. And this blue haired comedian began her routine by saying, “I wasn’t even sure if I should show up tonight once I saw what the theme was,” and worked it right into her routine.
The man in Venice Beach told us his biggest fear was passing down his deformity to his children.
Perhaps, in a world that keeps trying to erase boundaries between people but never really succeeds, the most loving thing we can do is to not avert our eyes?
In that regard, Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities is really just another stage, another window. Each of the stories are like little keyholes, like 1-minute peep shows where you put in your quarter and the curtain rises.
Go ahead and look.
Be sure to check out this collection, and let me know what you think in the comments below!
Also, just for fun, what are you doing for Halloween this year? What's your favorite spooky book? Drop a comment and let me know!
Thank you for visiting!
Have a fantastic day! =D
Have a fantastic day! =D
