Twittering From The Circus of The Dead
140 characters to tell your story. More if you string them together. I think you could spin quite a yarn with a thread like that.
The Facts
Text: Twittering From The Circus Of The Dead Author: Joe Hill
Genre: Horror, Twitter Thread, Epistolary Year: 2010
Available: Online here
The Fiction
Last week I wrote about short stories being told in a new medium, podcasts. This week I look at another modern horror story that makes use of a non-traditional medium. Twittering From The Circus of The Dead is a short story told in the form of a twitter thread.
Twitter is website where users share posts with a limit of 280 (it used to be 140) characters. One would think that the only way to tell a short story through such a medium would be to make use of a Six Word story. While it is possible for six word stories or other very short stories to be contained in a single tweet, the way twitter has leveraged itself as a storytelling medium is actually through the use of 'threads.'
Twitter threads are strangely enough one of the most relevant forms of short story telling in our pop culture. When these stories go viral they become, for a short time anyway, a major source of conversation on the internet and in pop culture. One such example of the popularity of this form of storytelling is the movie Zola which recently came out in 2021. Zola is based off of a twitter thread that went insanely vial in 2015, depicting one woman's wild weekend. I remember that twitter thread, and talking about it in real life with people at school. Now its a major movie and a big part of twitter's current landscape is threads made by people trying to make a splash and go viral like that story did.
However before viral internet threads became popular there was this story. Twittering From the Circus of The Dead was written in 2010 when twitter was still fairly new. Author Joe Hill saw the potential in the site to write a new kind of story and used it as the basis to write this epistolary horror story. Epistolary stories are usually written in the form of letters or diary entries. Twitter's social media format as both a record of a person's life and a kind of open letter to the public makes it the prefect modern form of epistolary storytelling.
Twittering From The Circus of The Dead is written in the form of tweets from user TYME2WASTE who it becomes clear is a teenage girl on a tense vacation with her family. Snow storms means the family has to drive instead of fly back from their holiday in Colorado. TYME makes it clear that the tension in the family, especially the volatile relationship between herself and her mother will make the trip awful.
The first half of the twitter thread describes TYME's boredom during the long drive, her mother's condescending disapproval that she is always on her phone, and her younger brother's antics. She complains a lot about her mother who she finds nagging, smug, and a 'bitch'. The thread continues to describe the family's road trip with a few light-hearted moments sprinkled between the tension and the boredom.
TYME describes how her mom and dad begin to fight in the car and wishes she could get out and be anywhere else. To her horror she gets her wish: her brother and Dad spot a circus and decide to pull in. Here in the second half of the twitter thread TYME descries The Circus of the Dead. The tone of the story begins to change. Instead of being about family drama during a road trip, TYME live-tweets the circus performance. The details of the performance begin to get very strange and disturbing. The ringmistress is on stilts, zombies dressed as clowns are on the ground below her and the ringmistress claims that if she falls they'll eat her.
TYME tweets out more disturbing acts and facets of the circus: a half starved lion who gets eaten by a hoard of zombies, a zombie thrown in a cannon and fired at the audience in pieces, and more the of ringmistress' strange speeches about how she is being held captive and begging for someone to pull her out of the ring. The circus attendants think this is all pretend and part of a show.
Then TYME's younger brother, Eric, volunteers to be a part of the knife throwing act. He gets hit in the neck with a knife and is wheeled away. The family assume he is in on the act but the mother is worried and sends the father to go backstage and check on him. The ringmistress returns and tells the audience she is sorry but that they are going to die, that their cars are being disposed of now as they sit in the tent, that thousands of people go missing on American roads every year, and that she was taken and has survived so long because she learned the stilts quick but she knows she wont survive much longer.
Eric returns as a zombie and knocks the ringmistress down. The lights go out and people start to scream. Finally TYME seems to realize that this is not an act. She begins begging people to call the police, telling people this isn't a joke and that her family needs help. She hides with her mom, whom she promises she loves and that she never meant any of the awful things she said about her.
The father walks by as a zombie and the mother can't help but say his name. The next tweet is a garbled string of letters. The last tweets in the thread are written in a different voice. Instead of TYME's terrified pleas for help they ask the reader if the twitter thread scared them, and if so they should check out the Circus of The Dead, and its new ringmistress who will host the circus while balanced on a trapeze over a hoard of zombies. The thread promises that the Circus of the Dead is the only circus with acts that truly defy death.
The Feeling
I first read this story years ago and when I decided I wanted to do a twitter thread as a form of short story I knew I had to track this story down. (It also fits with our October spooky theme)
Part of what makes this story so effective is how Hill is able to create and make us relate to characters in the format of tweets. The first half of the story may be lacking in gore and zombies, but it does the important work of making us care bout this family. If the thread had just started with TYME describing the Circus of the Dead it might have still been a grim story, but it wouldn't have been nearly as impactful. The fact that the first half of the story spends so much time building up the strained relationship between mother and daughter makes the payoff of the two of them hiding together at the end so much more emotional.
One of things things that stuck with me in this story even years after I first read it was the description of TYME's moment of complete happiness. She talks about being allowed to drive and being the only one awake to see the sun rise in the dessert, and seeing coyotes in the road with their fur glowing in that rising sun. Something about that imagery always struck me. It does almost the opposite thing that the mother and daughter relationship does. The arc of their relationship is TYME tweeting about how her mom's a bitch, to tweeting about how her mother is brave and she loves her. Here the beauty of the sunrise scene, a moment just for TYME, contrasts the horror of the Circus of the Dead.
Which leads me to the circus. There's something about the circus as a trope that we love in our storytelling. Something about this group of people with no roots, moving from place to place, and full of performers and mystiscm that sparks our imagination. The circus can be a place of wonder or a place of horror.
We never completely understand what the Circus of the Dead is, who is behind it or why they are dong it other then for the Evulz. Sometimes with horror that is part of the fear. It is not the in-depth knowledge or description of something terrifying, but the impression of something scary with room for us to imagine what's in the shadows that really thrills us.
Part of the horror of the story and its brilliance in formatting it as a twitter thread is the knowledge that no one will believe TYME. The last tweets made by her captors imply the whole thread was part of a publicity stunt, and the nature of the internet means that if someone was ever in a horror situation like this and tweeted about it they wouldn't be helped. Everyone would think it was just someone making up a story for clout.
If there is a lesson to this story its that if you are ever on a lonely stretch of American road and see a sign for the Circus of the Dead...keep driving. Or at least don't think tweeting about it will help you.
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