Death of a Clown is a manic lowlife circus confession about Eugenio Lovecraft, a failed professional clown, opioid addict, fugitive, prisoner, amateur day-trader, gambling addict, husband, corpse, and posthumous narrator. It wants to be a grotesque comedy, a prison memoir, a circus novel, a romance, a capitalist nightmare, a family-curse saga, a pandemic novel, a drug novel, a Southern gothic, a metaphysical afterlife monologue, and a history of clowning as humiliation art. Mostly, it is a loud, baggy, self-devouring rant that keeps mistaking accumulation for vision.
The prologue begins with Eugenio at the absolute bottom, broke, dope-sick, starving, suicidal, wandering Garden Shore in the rain. In an alley behind a strip club, he finds a dead man in a Cadillac, a skeleton at the wheel, a wig shot loose from his head. Eugenio does not call the police because he has warrants. He merely fixes the dead man’s wig and keeps walking. This is the novel’s first compressed version of itself: a potentially moving gesture of tenderness immediately buried under criminal panic, comic grotesquerie, and self-dramatizing doom.
He goes to Hep Spyder’s World Famous Bushwick Circus looking for work. He has just run from another circus after beating Dwight Ward, a tent boss tied to old show-business grievances involving the legendary clown Buffo Carducci. Eugenio brags about this victory and gets hired by Hep Spyder, though only barely. Spyder gives him a shirt, seventy-eight dollars, and a warning not to fuck him. Eugenio immediately meets Jackie, the ticket girl who turns out to be the star trapeze artist. She is young, beautiful, mystical, vegetarian, fatalistic, and already attached to the elderly circus boss. She reads Eugenio’s astrology and tells him he is star-destined to ruin her life. Naturally, the book then spends hundreds of pages proving her right.
