The Final Confession of Mabel Stark » (Reprint)

Robert Hough has made his name writing narrative-driven nonfiction about characters "who live beyond our culture's conception of normalcy," for such magazines as Saturday Night and Toronto Life. Circus life in general and Mabel Stark in particular are tailor-made subjects for his first novel, in that the circus was a travelling sanctuary for misfits, waifs and strays — including Mabel Stark.

In the 1910s and '20s, during the golden age of the big top, Mabel Stark was the superstar of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, and one of America's most eccentric celebrities. A tiny, curvaceous Kentucky blonde in a white leather bodysuit, Mabel was brazen, sexually adventurous, and suicidally courageous. The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is Robert Hough's brilliant, highly acclaimed novelization of her fantastic life. It is 1968 — Mabel is just turning eighty and is about to lose her job at Jungleland, a Southern California game park. Devastated by the loss of her cats, she looks back on her life and her five husbands: the fifth would one day be tragically mauled by her one true love, her ferocious yet amorous 550-pound Bengal tiger Rajah. Starting with her escape from a mental institution to begin her circus career as a burlesque dancer, Mabel's exquisitely voiced confession is a live wire of dark secrets, broken dreams, and comic escapades. It is a brilliant, exhilarating story of an America before television and movies, when the spectacle of the circus reigned and an unlikely woman captured the public imagination with her singular charm and audacity.

The New Yorker

The circus has long been a refuge for society’s misfits; for some, it is the inherent danger of the acts that offers a welcome escape from reality. Faith—the heroine of the first novel by the late Amanda Davis, Wonder When You'll Miss Me—runs away from her high school, her mother, and the police and remakes herself as Annabelle, the elephant-dung mucker for a traveling circus troupe. Psychologically disjointed (she is trailed at all times by her imaginary alter ego), Annabelle seeks solace in acrobatics. “I wanted to tell her about the woman on the trapeze. How I’d held my breath and how my heart had pounded,” Davis writes. “How I’d seen a whole world up there in the air, and the one down here had disappeared.”

Ascension, a novel by Steve Galloway, focuses on the travails of a wire walker named Salvo Ursari. As a child, his parents were killed by Transylvanian villagers; forty-five years later, during the family act on the high wire, his twin daughters plunge to their death. But while Ursari is on the wire, all that matters is the next step. “Immediately everything receded. All his fears, all his memories, all he loved and all he loathed,” Galloway writes.

The eponymous heroine (based on a real-life tiger trainer) of Robert Hough’s The Final Confession of Mabel Stark joins the circus after escaping from a psychiatric ward, where she was committed for refusing to fulfill her wifely duties. For Mabel, life with her big cats reminds her that happiness always has its dark side: “No matter how well things’re going, you always know it’s only a matter of time before a claw catches, or a tooth snags, or a forepaw lashes, and your contentment feels bearable again.” (Andrea Thompson)