This is what got me into horror. I was a wimp when it came to horror back in elementary school. Couldn’t even look at the covers of horror books without getting vivid nightmares. This included the covers of Cirque Du Freak, prominently placed in my local bookstore. Naturally, I avoided that section of the store like the plague.
My dad actually found an American copy of the book in a used bookstore. He got it for me because "There's a spider on the cover." So I decided, what the hell let's give it a whirl. I ended up reading the entire series as well as most of Darren Shan's other series for kids. It was all horror stuff, but I rarely found it frightening. I was just an emo kid who was really into the whole vampire/werewolf shtick and so naturally I read the series a bunch of times over.
It got me into horror as a whole, a genre I have come to love. I think there was a weird mixture of bombast and tragedy to a lot of Cirque Du Freak (especially given that characters died like flies) and while I was used to plenty of character death by then, there was something about LITERALLY EVERY CHARACTER BEING KILLED OFF INCLUDING THE KIDS that made me unreasonably sad.
See Also, Demonata. Outside of the last book (which even little me despised) I think this was a wonderful horror series for kids. I sure do love my rooms made of flesh and people trapped between walls for millennia. I feel like these books made me a weirder adult and I appreciate that.
