The Funhouse by Owen West

JetBlackDragonfly

Oct 13, 2023

3 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

I first read The Funhouse when it was published in 1980. I was thirteen, and my sister bought it for me. It has been republished with a carousel horse on the cover, but this is the original. I have fond memories of this novel, and I wasn't disappointed reading it again.

This story was the basis for the film The Funhouse, but it is not a novelization; it's independently based on the same characters. Amy Harper is a seventeen-year-old living with her distant father, alcoholic mother, and younger brother in Ohio. When she tells her jock boyfriend she is pregnant, he splits, leaving her to ask her devout Catholic mother to help with an abortion. The novel has a grisly start as years ago, her mother was once married to an abusive carnival worker and gave birth to a deformed child, which she killed. Resentful of her, the Carny waits many years, always watching kids at the carnival, believing she would remarry and have more children—on whom he would exact his frustrated anger. He also remarried, and his wife bore another deformed son who was brought up as a carnival worker. Mentally deranged, he has a habit of killing people wherever the carnival travels, leaving his dad to clean up. Amy and her best friend Liz double date, get high, and hang out at the carnival, not knowing the Carny has discovered who Amy is, and their ride into the funhouse will be a deadly trap.

This novel was written by Owen West, who is actually veteran horror writer Dean Koontz in his early days using a pseudonym to reimagine a screenplay by Larry Block. Koontz is arguably second in popularity to Stephen King, with many of his pseudonymous titles now reprinted under his real name. Koontz has said he wrote most of this before even looking at the script, creating entire backstories for the characters. This explains how we have 200 pages of Amy's pregnancy guilt and her mother's Catholic condemnation before they even get to the carnival, and another 45 pages before they enter the funhouse. The film bypasses all these subplots and immediately sends the kids to the carnival, where they view a few sideshows before sneaking in as a lark to spend the night in the closed funhouse. Either way, they don't know a dangerous mutant lives inside.

The film is one of the better horror films of the time, light on violence and full of scares, with a tense and thematic finale. The monster has a Frankenstein feel about him, he's terrible but kind of sad in a way. Special mention to the production designers for the carny atmosphere and the funhouse design, which seems to improbably expand the further they go in, yet retain it's authenticity as the funhouse you wish it could be. The film bases the terror on being trapped in the deadly funhouse, and the book on a revenge plot that could take place anywhere. Both the film and the book work for me - each acting as a different version of the same story - the best killer mutant stalking teenagers at a carnival I've read. The Funhouse has always been the bar to reach. Still a solid read.

1980 / Paperback / 275 pages