“Ridi Bobo” (1993)

I thought this story by Robert Devereaux was pretty well done. It’s on the short side, which helps it stay so resolutely in bizarre character. Killer clowns don’t seem that original anymore but maybe they were more so then, and these aren’t exactly killer clowns anyway. In fact, actually, I get more of a hit of Roger Rabbit cartoon physics in the way this goes (which also fits the timeframe of when Devereaux might have been writing). Lots of bops to the noggin and so forth. Extreme violence but generally everyone recovers quickly. The story is all cliches as Devereaux clowns up the details of an extramarital affair and its exposure. Some of it is comical but more of it, like clown sexuality, is a little disturbing. All I know about that is genitalia is described as rubber chickens for males and honkers for females and it’s all right out there to observe, though it’s not entirely clear how these rubber chickens and honkers work. But then, we may not want to know. But then, we may. The story: a clown husband suspects his clown wife is cheating on him. He hires a clown detective to look into it. Sure enough, Momo the detective trails Kiki the wife to a seedy low-rent motel and gets pictures of her in the act with some other clown. When the husband finds out, he slaughters his whole family—pet piglets, twin sons, and wife—and then kills himself. So I guess it is about killer clowns after all. The simple beats of the story enable it to lean very hard and creatively into the clown aspect. There’s a lot of slapstick, pratfalls, miming, clown costumes, and clown props, and if some parts of it are funny they are often uncomfortable. The clowns have names like Bobo and Momo and Juju. We see a law enforcement scene with “the screaming whistles in the bright red mouths of the Kops clinging to the Kop Kar as it raced into the neighborhood, hands to their domed blue hats, the bass drums booming.” As Bobo kills his family he pauses to draw teardrops on his face under his eye. Actually, if anything, what’s most disturbing about this story now is the familiarity of the spectacle of a madman slaughtering a bunch of people and then himself. Sad!

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.