The child doesn't much care. The power of each story is to be found in the anxiety we bring to its reading. The title story of this new collection is the best, a sinuous Gothic fantasy in which a touring performer, Hensch, enters an unnamed town and asks for volunteers for his knife-throwing exhibition. There's been a hint that something unusual happens at these shows, the narrator protesting a bit too energetically that one goes for Hensch's skill, not to see the volunteers' blood. At the show Hensch first undertakes the usual tame skillful displays.
Several townspeople come forward and are nicked.
They sit down to applause. Harter, a lazy womanizer, and his lover are caught in the act by her husband. They come for him early one morning in a dreamlike sequence, carrying him off to a field where an old dueling pistol is placed in his hand and another pointed at him by the husband. Mysterious Charles Sarabee begins by building an ordinary Coney Island amusement park. It's a hit.