Cirque De Freak By Darren Shan Reflection Document By Alexus Patrick

I think that Cirque De Freak by Darren Shan was rather strange. The book wasn’t very well-written in my opinion. The plot was too outlandish, the characters were too dense, and the word choice was just awful in general. Basically, Cirque De Freak talks about Darren Shan who visits a traveling freak show with his best friend Steve. Steve, who practically worships monsters, recognizes a performer from the cirque (Mr. Crepsley) as a vampire from one of the photographs in his monster research books. Steve finds the performer after the show and begs Mr. Crepsley to change him into a vampire; however, Mr. Crepsley declines because Steve apparently has “evil blood”. Darren somehow watches all of this from afar and gets the idea that he should blackmail the vampire into letting him keep a rare spider that Mr. Crepsley uses for the performance. He learns how to control the spider with his mind over the course of weeks and he even shows it to Steve while explaining how he stole it. He practices a trick with the spider on Steve; however, the trick backfires and the rare spider ends up biting his comrade instead. Darren goes to Mr. Crepsley and demands a cure for his hospitalized friend. Mr. Crepsley will only agree if Darren becomes his half-vampire assistant and Darren consents after much debate. After they visit the hospital and cure Steve, Darren, who has already been turned into a half vampire, flees back home and calls off his deal with the vampire. Darren then returns to find Mr. Crepsley AGAIN after he drinks his friend’s blood and almost bites his sister. Mr. Crepsley helps Darren fake his death and the two walk away from the town forever once Mr. Crepsley digs Darren out of his own grave. Let us also not forget when Steve vows to ki...

... middle of paper ...

...e freak show and nobody wants to accept that turning into an adult, or vampire, is inevitable no matter what we do. We want to keep our friends and family close, but life will interfere and you will be taken away from them by experiencing your own “death” or cruel transition into something you never wanted to be in the first place. Maybe the spider black mail and the crazy friend just displays the evil in life and how it can speed along the process or growing up mentally faster. The more and more I try to think about the connotation of Cirque De Freak the more I realize that it’s probably just a very bad book. No matter what Cirque De Freak was supposed to achieve in this story, the book can be identified as whatever the reader makes of it. I guess that’s kind of the point of literature. We’ll always find a reason to relate to the words on a page one way or another.