Like his characters, Irving's technique recalls the circus. This is a busy, chaotic book. Characters come on and off stage, plots surface and disappear only to surface again later, the atmosphere is at once funny, confusing, frightening, bizarre, dirty, and sad.

Stories occur within stories with Darawalla/Irving playing the ringmaster god. At one point, the omniscient narrator asks if the "creative process [has] eclipsed his common sense." Like a child enthralled by the circus, Irving has given himself over to the chaos.

Yet for all its chaos, the novel is still highly choreographed and the careful reader will find an intricate web of connections among the scenic performances.

One example of the web of connections in A Son of the Circus occurs in Irving's use of the vampire theme.

Darawalla (here, Dracula) extracts blood from dwarfs, not that he may live but that...