Interesting to compare this to the last freakshow we visited, in Blackpool--there, on stage as shining public spectacles, the horror was that the freaks were fundamentally ordinary even in their sins, having blundered upon a thing of real strangeness and promptly getting stuck fighting over it. Here, in this out-of-the-way carnival where the main attraction is the secret booze, the horror is that the freaks really are freaks, not in the funny sense, but in the sense of being the outermost limits of a human thing.
Interesting to compare this to the last freakshow we visited, in Blackpool--there, on stage as shining public spectacles, the horror was that the freaks were fundamentally ordinary even in their sins, having blundered upon a thing of real strangeness and promptly getting stuck fighting over it. Here, in this out-of-the-way carnival where the main attraction is the secret booze, the horror is that the freaks really are freaks, not in the funny sense, but in the sense of being the outermost limits of a human thing.