I'm Sorry Mr Giggles 🤡
I’m Sorry Mr Giggles
On his last day at the circus, Mr Giggles painted his whiteface over the bruises, then he painted the bruises back on top of that. It seemed the right thing to do.
Background
Mr Giggles has turned up in a few stories I’ve written. He was the antagonist of an unpublished novel I wrote many years ago, called Fuck You, Clown. Only a handful of people have read it, and I don’t plan to show it to anyone else. I should destroy my last copies, but I can’t quite bring myself to do it.
It’s a good novel but contains a serious flaw. The book describes Archer Drake, a civilian who is adopted by some unpleasant clowns. They do awful things and Archer stands by and watches. He doesn’t agree with what they do, but he never tries to stop them, remaining both disapproving and complacent1.
The problem with the book is that it’s hard to write something like that without making the thing you’re criticising look compelling. It’s the problem with war movies being exciting; or how anti-drug movies (even Requiem for a Dream) toy with some idea of doomed romanticism. And it’s hard to write a novel about terrible clowns where nobody enjoys the antics of the clowns2.
Mr Giggles was an angry, awful human being, and the things he did were unforgivable. But I also felt a compassion for him. He was once innocent and sweet, someone who delighted in entertaining children. At the heart of his rage was a black hole of sadness.
Reading the novel, it is easy to feel that he got what he deserved. But fiction encourages these moments of cheap resolution. It would have been better if he’d found a way to start atoning for his awful actions.
Announcements
Later this month, Kate Shields has a residency at Fabrica in Brighton. This runs from 21st-25th April and tickets are available for two workshops on the 23rd and a communal ritual on the 24th. I’m very sad I won’t be able to make this, but it is highly recommended, exploring the themes of stone circles and community.
Kate is also part of the Toadlicker Collective’s Newhaven show, Folklore which is on Thurdays through Saturdays until the 12th. My friend Frankie Cluney is also participating in this one.
The latest episode of the Jew Credit podcast is out, with an episode on magic. It starts with a magic trick performed in audio, and includes a fascinating discussion of the difference between illusion and mentalism.
Tickets are available for Rosy Carrick’s Poetry Gang Bang with an amazing range of poets across two nights. I will be doing my first performance in ages on the second night. It will be very short, but I have booked the following day off, and hope to stay out as long as I can.
Recommendations
Marcus Kliewer's We Used To Live Here was a recommendation from Ruth Collier's Substack. It's an uncomfortable horror story about a woman alone in her house who is visited by a family who used to live there. It starts as an awkward social situation, a sort of home invasion of manners, and slides into cosmic horror.
While I had some issues with the book's writing style, it was brisk and entertaining. It felt very much like a book that emerged from the internet, both through its form and in the ideas behind it.
The publisher's comparison with Danielewski's House of Leaves is foolhardy, since Kliewer's book has little of the other's intricacy and weirdness. But We Used to Live Here is playful. It contains a mix of documentation, footnotes and a couple of puzzles, such as morse code at the end of each chapter.
Like qntm's There Is No Antimemetics Division (due published by a division of penguin), We Used to Live Here started out as an internet success, being serialised on /r/nosleep. I'm excited about seeing creepypasta emerging as paperbacks from the big publishers.
(I can think of examples of the web to book journey dating back to Geoff Ryman's 1998 release of his web novel 253; House of Leaves, of course - but it feels like there ought to be more.)
One subject reported waking every night to see a cardboard cutout of her deceased father standing in the corner of her room. An old woman would be hunched behind the cutout, hiding, stifling laughter. Each time the patient took a breath, the old woman moved the cardboard cutout a little closer. This would continue until the old woman stood right at the patient's bedside, at which point the patient would wake, screaming.
The morse code in the book has stuck in my head. It wasn’t a difficult puzzle. I simply googled for the hidden text. If I’d wanted to lean into the spirit of the book more, I could have transliterated it myself. I’m not sure where this morse code was intended to come from in terms of the book’s story, but the puzzle added a little interesting world-building. It reminded me of ARGs. I ought to be able to think of more books that include puzzles like this, but I’m struggling. Any suggestions?
The novel was, in part, a reaction to the protests over the Iraq War, where I felt that the left had provided a token resistance but, ultimately, favoured the status quo and settled for that. I told my friend Tom this before he read the book; afterwards he said that didn’t come through.
Breaking Bad is an interesting litmus test. It’s about a man who, through his own ego, causes harm to thousands of people. But it’s very easy to see Walter White (‘the one who knocks’) as heroic and, you know, buy T-shirts of him.
The second half of the last sentence of the first footnote: this is a fabulously sad short story.
The glamourising thing... this is (one major reason) why I like so little of what passes for culture nowadays. I managed, I think, six episodes of Breaking Bad (which is probably five more episodes than any other US TV series I've watched in the last 20 years; it absolutely appalled me).