“One of the Carnival Man’s long legs extended onto the pathway from behind the booth, and Laura’s heart leapt into her throat. One more step from him, and she would be exposed.”
Just in time for spooky season, here’s my long overdue review of Sarah McKnight’s pageturner of a young adult horror novel, Carousel!
Fans of nineties teen horror in the vein of Urban Legend and I Know What You Did Last Summer are going to eat this one up, but it’ll likely also appeal to contemporary young people (eep, I’m old!) eager for something fresh. While Carousel boasts shades of the underrated Are You Afraid of the Dark?: Carnival of Doom (seriously–I was surprised by how much I enjoyed that miniseries), and draws on a wealth of tried and true horror motifs and scenarios, the way it combines its disperate elements is unique and inventive. Carousel is fun, campy, and gorey in equal measure, with a cast of characters you can cheer for and whose adventures you’ll want to follow long after you’ve finished the book.
Carousel has a classic opening and setup: on Hallowe’en night a group of teens dresses up in costumes and sits down for a game of truth or dare. Our MC, the somewhat shy and mousy Laura, is immediately nervous, something that isn’t helped by the fact that when her turn rolls around she’s tasked with kissing her secret crush, Maddie. Laura chickens out, and on a replacement dare agrees to visit the abandoned carnival by herself. Maddie (who was, perhaps, a tad disappointed not to get kissed) isn’t about to let Laura visit the haunted carnival alone and insists on accompanying her. The girls venture out alone and begin to explore, all the while learning more about one another and playfully edging around the question of their obvious chemistry. The sequence also provides ample opportunity to explore the backstory of the carnival itself: after a tragic fire on the ferris wheel about a hundred years ago, the fair was permanently closed. It’s been left to rust since that day, serving as a fun spot for teenagers to sneak inside and get up to trouble.
Laura and Maddie are having a grand old time, but when they decide to fool around on the carousel, the fairground attraction suddenly comes alive and the world (literally and phantasmagorically) begins to spin. A sinister ringmaster–a figure who’ll come to be known as the Carnival Man–appears before them. Laura and Maddie try to run, but an invisible barrier blocks their exit, and as they’ll soon discover, both they and a number of other long-lost teens are trapped inside the Carnival Man’s personal playground. Not only are the teens (and the one adult victim) stuck inside the Carnival Man’s disturbed wonderland, but they’re also caught in a temporal prison of another kind. Within the carnival, time appears not to have moved at all, but the characters themselves hale from a variety of time periods.
The fairground, Laura and Maddie learn, was also once much more populous, but over time the Carnival Man has picked his captives off one by one. When the Carnival Man catches you–and you really don’t want to be caught–the whole population is transported to a huge circus tent to watch the victim be dispatched in some creatively disturbing new way. All the more upsetting is the fact that the spectators are under the Carnival Man’s control during these episodes, meaning they’re forced to sit frozen in place and applaud the deaths of their friends and lovers.
One of my favourite parts of Carousel is how well McKnight builds up her ensemble cast, and this fact makes the aforementioned kill scenes all the more impactful. Laura and Maddie are likeable and easy to follow, but for me it’s the tragedy of the carnival’s other denizens that captured me most (and I’m a sucker for a strong supporting cast). With the carnival having been in operation so long, the Carnival Man has had decades upon decades from which to draw his victims, which means the characters Laura encounters range from an elusive child of the 20s, to 50s sweethearts, to 90s hooligans. The book is incredibly fast-paced, with action taking place over the course of a short time span, yet despite that, McKnight manages to make you care about the motley population of the fairground in short time. Part of this, I feel, is down to the smart reliance on the characters’ interpersonal relationships as shorthand to get us rooting for them. When one of the 50s sweethearts starts to mentally crumble under the weight of their trauma, for example, there’s a real danger they could slip up and get caught–it’s a danger we feel all the more keenly because of the impact it could have on their lover. The network of relationships, friendships, and alliances amongst those trapped is one of the most fun (and nervewracking) parts of the book, the already brutal kill scenes made all the more heartwrenching because we genuinely care about the people doing the dying. To some degree, there’s an ease and a lightness to the characterization that I would call typical of horror of this type–an archetypal quality to the cast that prepares us to enjoy them. When done well–which it is here–this use of archetype can be a powerful yet economic way to invest the audience in the story and characters.
Laura and Maddie are similarly well-characterized, and there’s a strong throughline for Laura in particular that involves a continued wrestling with her fears and her struggle to be brave not only in the face of abject horror and death, but in terms of her own emotional vulnerability. It’s tremendously satisfying to watch Laura come into her own, seeing her rise to the occasion and unite (as much as possible) the Carnival Man’s victims.
“Feel the fear and do it anyway . . .. It means that even though we’re afraid, we’re going to stop the Carnival Man from hurting anyone else. No matter what it takes.”
Additional tension is added by the threat that if should Laura and Maddie escape, they may emerge in some far-distant future. Indeed, for much of the novel, I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see if a new victim would turn up, fresh from the year 2040! I’ll leave a mystery whether this happens, but regardless of the eventual outcome(s), the possibility of Laura and Maddie becoming unmoored in time remains an implicit one that McKnight keeps subtle and tense throughout.
The plot is far more of a focus in Carousel than the prose, though it’s worth mentioning that McKnight’s writing doesn’t get in its own way. This is a book that understands its genre and is careful not to overburden the text when it would hinder the pacing. There’s some fun found fiction elements to the story as well, which keeps it structurally interesting. As Laura and Maddie struggle to learn the “rules” of surviving the fairground, the audience becomes privy a series of news segments documenting the girls’ disappearance and the desperate search for them. Part of me did expect these to play slightly more of a role in the narrative, either influencing the outcome of events inside the carnival, or revealing information to the reader to heighten the tension, but nonetheless they were a fun addition and became a way through which to characterize Laura and Maddie’s home lives before the incident.
While Carousel itself isn’t a straight-up slasher, it evoked genuine feelings of nostalgia in me, with a story and cast that felt fresh out of a nineties teen slasher, but with a unique plot full of devilish mystery and even a (small) dash of queer romance. Carousel doesn’t skimp on the gore during its kill scenes, but McKnight’s judicious use of them means there’s plenty of room for the story and characters to breathe. The storyline here goes some exciting and unexpected places that open it up to future interconnected works. I for one would love to see McKnight return to the world of Carousel to explore more of the lore at the heart of the novel.
Purchase Carousel from Amazon.
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