the heavy, main drive chain that operated the gondolas overhead. The
sharp-toothed chain caught in his clothes, jerked him off his feet, and
dragged him violently down the aisle, away from Amy and Joey. The
creature kicked and screamed but couldn’t free himself. The legs of
his trousers tore as he skimmed across the floor, and then his skin was
scoured offwith equal efficiency. His left hand snagged for a moment
where the chain passed under and then over a steel drum, for a second
or two the mechanism jammed, but then the powerful motors pulled the
chain into motion again, the freak’s hand came through the huge gear
with a couple of fingers missing. Then the beast was being dragged
back toward Amy and Joey. It was no longer struggling with the chain,
it hadn’t the strength left to resist, it was howling in agony now,
spasming, dying. Nevertheless, as it passed them, it reached for Amy’s
ankle. Failing that, it managed to hook its claws through one leg of
Joey’s jeans. The boy yelped and fell and started sliding after the
freak, but Amy moved quickly, she grabbed the boy and held on tight.
For a moment the chain froze again, and the freak stopped moving, and
they strained in a macabre tug-of-war, but then one of the thing’s
claws snapped, and Joey’s pants tore, and the chain began to clatter
again, and the freak was carried away. It was tossed and battered like
a rag doll until it finally became pinned in the huge, main cogwheel,
where the thumb-sized teeth of the gears ground most of the way through
its neck before freezing up.
The freak was motionless, limp.
Amy threw down the pistol she had taken from the barker.
Joey was staring at her, wide-eyed, shocked.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said.
He ran into her arms and hugged her.
Suffused with joy in spite of the blood and horror all around her,
overflowing with the exhilarating joy of life, Amy realized that the
barker had been wrong when he’d said that God could not help her. God
had helped hen-God or some universal force that sometimes went by the
name of God. He was with her now.
She felt Him at her side. But He wasn’t at all like poor Mama said He
was. He wasn’t a vengeful God with a million rules and harsh
punishments.
He was simply . . . kindness life and gentleness and love. He was
caring.
. And then that special moment passed, the aura of His presence faded,
and Amy sighed. She picked up Joey and carried him out of the
funhouse.
AFTERWORD IN 1980, WHEN my nOVe1S had nOt Yet begUn to appear on
bestseller lists, Jove Books asked me to write the novelization of a
screenplay by Larry Block (not the Lawrence Block who writes the
marvelous Matthew Scudder detective novels and other fine suspense
fiction, another Larry Block specializing in film writing), which was
being shot by Tobe Hooper, the young director who had made a name for
himself with a low-budget horror film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I had
always thought that transforming a screenplay into a real novel would
be interesting and demanding, so I was motivated by the challenge. To
be truthful, I was also motivated by the financial terms, which were
more generous than what I was receiving for my own novels. When I
signed on to write The Funhouse, the inflation rate was 18% and
interest rates were well above 20%, and it seemed .
chapters, which were the scenes with which the movie was almost solely
concerned. I didn’t start to use the screenplay until I had written
four-fifths of the book.
The project was fun, however, because I’d long had a serious interest
in carnivals and had collected a lot of material about them. As an
unhappy child in a severely dysfunctional family, living across the
street from the fairgrounds where the county fair pitched its tents
every August, I had often dreamed about running away with the carnival
to escape the poverty, fear, and violence of my daily life. Years
after writing The Funhouse, I made far more extensive use of my