Curious Toys (Elizabeth Hand)
May. 1st, 2022 07:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maplemoodA historical murder mystery bringing together a serial killer, an amusement park, Chicago's silent film industry, a crossdressing teenage girl, and a fictionalized version of the outsider artist Henry Darger.
It's 1915; Pin's mother works as a fortune teller in the Riverview Amusement Park. Pin, who disguises herself as a boy for protection, earns spare change delivering drugs for Max, another sideshow performer. One hot summer day, she watches a man and a little girl with a yellow dress enter the Hell Gate ride. The man comes out, but the girl doesn't.
Curious Toys is gritty and disturbingly nasty in parts--it's told in multiple POVs, so in addition to Pin, Henry, an amusement park police officer, a screenwriter for Essanay Studios, and Charlie Chaplin (!), we get chapters from the murderer's perspective. Jury's out on whether the murderer or the Chaplin chapters were harder to read. Still, Pin is very much the main character, and her relationship with Henry becomes the emotional center of the book.
If you don't know anything about Henry Darger (before opening this book, I didn't), I do think Curious Toys is a good place to start, since Elizabeth Hand clearly loves to research and is very good about weaving that research in organically. Darger worked most of his life as a janitor in a Catholic hospital, writing a multipage fantasy epic and creating weirdly beautiful but often disturbing artwork featuring young girls. He was obsessed with helping abused children and had ideas about forming a "Child Protective Service," which is how he and Pin cross paths in the book.
Like the Cass Neary series, one of the things that makes Curious Toys so enjoyable is that it's all about art and the people who make art--Henry, the silent film actors, actresses, and screenwriters Pin comes across, the sideshow performers at the park, and eventually Pin herself. There's plenty about the dark corners of the industry, but Curious Toys is also about innovation and wonder. For one person, art might be an excuse to destroy people, but for another, it might be a way to save them.
It's 1915; Pin's mother works as a fortune teller in the Riverview Amusement Park. Pin, who disguises herself as a boy for protection, earns spare change delivering drugs for Max, another sideshow performer. One hot summer day, she watches a man and a little girl with a yellow dress enter the Hell Gate ride. The man comes out, but the girl doesn't.
Curious Toys is gritty and disturbingly nasty in parts--it's told in multiple POVs, so in addition to Pin, Henry, an amusement park police officer, a screenwriter for Essanay Studios, and Charlie Chaplin (!), we get chapters from the murderer's perspective. Jury's out on whether the murderer or the Chaplin chapters were harder to read. Still, Pin is very much the main character, and her relationship with Henry becomes the emotional center of the book.
If you don't know anything about Henry Darger (before opening this book, I didn't), I do think Curious Toys is a good place to start, since Elizabeth Hand clearly loves to research and is very good about weaving that research in organically. Darger worked most of his life as a janitor in a Catholic hospital, writing a multipage fantasy epic and creating weirdly beautiful but often disturbing artwork featuring young girls. He was obsessed with helping abused children and had ideas about forming a "Child Protective Service," which is how he and Pin cross paths in the book.
Like the Cass Neary series, one of the things that makes Curious Toys so enjoyable is that it's all about art and the people who make art--Henry, the silent film actors, actresses, and screenwriters Pin comes across, the sideshow performers at the park, and eventually Pin herself. There's plenty about the dark corners of the industry, but Curious Toys is also about innovation and wonder. For one person, art might be an excuse to destroy people, but for another, it might be a way to save them.