Carnival Wolves by Peter Rock

I am eight times as old as this child, he thought. Do I know eight times as much? No. Not nearly.

From Peter Rock’s Carnival Wolves

Think of Carnival Wolves as a reverse picaresque novel divided into short stories. Where a traditional picaresque novel might follow a single character as he/she is affected by various

other characters, Carnival Wolves examines how a single character affects those various other characters. Simple, right?

Each section describes a unique setting, one in which the protagonist is suspiciously absent. But as the action evolves into a complete story, the protagonists shows up in some , natural way, if even for a single sentence. It is merely his presence that strings this novel together. At times I thought that maybe the publisher tacked on the “A Novel” tag just to sell more copies – as the novel reads more like a short story collection. Oh, well. Smart marketing, I suppose.