A Ragtag Group of Liberated Performers Face Down a Vicious Tyrant in SHOW

Prolific, award-winning author Shane Peacock turns his skills back to YA fiction this spring with a new novel that is as inventive as it is fitting for the world we're living in right at this very moment.

Set in a speculative 1899, throughout an entertainment-obsessed Empire of America, Show (Cormorant Books/Dancing Cat Books) follows Solomon Hunt, a young man who leaves home after his father's death in search of work and a living for his family. Along the way, he crosses paths with a prodigal, genius-performer called The Seer, who he frees from captivity in a sideshow. 

The two new friends strike out together, but they are hunted by the particularly vicious Leopold J. Coop, who dominates this strange landscape and has designs on consolidating his power and ruling as president. As these found-compatriots flee across the nation from coast to coast, they rescue other captive performers, including a human cannonball, a giant acrobat, a blues musician, an outlaw gunslinger, a talking gorilla, and more. Destined for an eventual showdown with this oppressor, Hunt's group of oddballs and outcasts band together for an explosive performance that will save them all.

We have a fascinating Long Story Novelist Interview with the author today on Open Book, so read on to find out more about this spectacular adventure!

Open Book:

Do you remember how you first started this novel or the very first bit of writing you did for it?  

Shane Peacock:

This is an unusual novel in that it is for both young readers and adults. It started out as being just for kids – and it still is for them – but I think the end result makes it a true cross-over novel for young, and newly adult, and middle-aged, and old, in the spirit of works like “The Little Prince” or “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” I actually wrote the first draft more than a decade ago, but other projects ended up taking precedence. Then, I realized how good this idea was (he says modestly) and how it fit with our times, our entertainment-obsessed, materialistic, often racist times, attitudes found in many countries, but led by the United States, especially now, it seems. The current situation in the U.S. and the aims of the president of that country just seemed to fit my story. I didn’t have to change it a great deal. My very first book, The Great Farini, was about a great Canadian circus personality and showman. I used my extensive research about him, and my interest in circus and allied arts, when I wrote “Show.”

OB:

How did you choose the setting of your novel? What connection, if any, did you have to the setting when you began writing? 

SP:

There was no other place to set this particular story than in the United States and Canada, though those two countries are known in the novel as The Empire of America and North Britain, respectively. I have lived my whole life in Canada, next to the huge, influential country to our south. I brought the two of them together in an imagined 1899, though that time, at least in my story, is curiously a great deal like our own times.

OB:

Did you find yourself having a "favourite" amongst your characters? If so, who was it and why? 

SP:

I hope there are many characters that readers will love in “Show.” It is filled with unusual and diverse players in the story’s plot. But if I have a favorite (favourite!) it would likely be “the Seer,” the little person who leads Solomon Hunt on this adventure in the Empire of America, picking up young performers as they go. He is an entertainment genuis, mute yet brilliant, of mysterious background and motivations, with an origin story that will stun readers when it is revealed near the end of the novel. He is a “seer” who tells us a lot about who we are, where we have been, and where we may be going. 

OB:

If you had to describe your book in one sentence, what would you say?

SP:

One sentence would be tough. Let me give it a whirl. “Show” is the story of a diverse troupe of young performers traveling through the entertainment-obsessed, racist, materialistic Empire of America in an imaged 1899, pursed by an evil, wealthy showman, who is also running for the presidency of the Empire. Whew. 

OB:

Did you do any specific research for this novel? Tell us a bit about that process. 

SP:

As mentioned, much of the research came from my knowledge of circus and allied arts, which I gained from writing The Great Farini biography many years ago. Farini probably had the most amazing life story of any Canadian in our history – a man who walked over Niagara Falls on a high wire, invented the human cannonball act, explored the Kalahari Desert, and was an author, inventor, linguist and explorer, once called the greatest showman on earth by P.T. Barnum. So, his hugely varied life, much of it spent in circus-related arts, allowed me to research a wide variety of late 19th century and early 20th century show business. I also became good friends with Jay Cochrane, the Prince of the Air, the world’s greatest high-wire walker, often interviewed him, talked with him for many hours as a friend, and saw him walk extraordinary outdoor high wires, often from unusal vantage points. I learned a great deal from him, and much of it helped me create the world of “Show.”

OB:

Did you include an epigraph in your book? If so, how did you choose it and how does it relate to the narrative?

SP: 

The novel’s pre-textual quotation is from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” the famous, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.” That is true in my novel and will be true of the world and its human inhabitants as long as it all exists. Art tells the truth.

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Shane Peacock is an author, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter, published in twenty languages in eighteen countries. He has won seven Junior Library Guild of America Selection honors, two Arthur Ellis Awards, the Libris Award, the Geoffrey Bilson Award, and has been short-listed for the Governor General’s Award. His young adult novels include The Book of Us, the acclaimed Boy Sherlock Holmes series, the Dylan Maples Adventures, and The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim trilogy. He is also the author of As We Forgive Others, the first novel in the Northern Gothic Mysteries, for adult readers. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, with his wife, journalist Sophie Kneisel.