Acclaimed nature writer, essayist and novelist (Children Are Diamonds) Edward Hoagland has also written some fine short stories. Thanks to The Devil's Tub, readers can now enjoy 10 specimens of his short fiction previously left languishing (some for more than 50 years) in the back issues of such magazines as the New Yorker and Esquire.
Prior to attending college, Hoagland worked at a circus for two summers, and three of these tales draw on those years; the best of them shares its title with the collection. The "devil's tub" (or Wall of Death) was known to attendees of fairs and carnivals of yore as a rickety, cylindrical wooden "tub" that motorcyclists nosily and speedily circumnavigated. Jake "Pappy" Thibodeau "occupied the saddle of a cycle as another man might loaf in an easy chair." Now in his 50s and weary from years of risking his life, his trip is winding down. It's a poignant, tour-de-force portrait of a man, his family and the world of sideshows and carnies.
"Circus Dawn" also captures carnival life as it tells the story of Chief and Fiddler, caretakers of the big cats. Animals feature prominently in Hoagland's stories beyond the big top as well. In "The Final Fate of the Alligators," Arnie Bush kept a pet alligator in his New York City apartment, but it has outgrown the bathtub. Now what? From a lonely man looking for love at Coney Island to a man who hides from a grizzly bear in a beaver's dam, "desperate as a hooked fish," Hoagland's characters are always sympathetic, decent people, memorably drawn. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher