Journal

This book did not begin with an idea. It began with a place, and the place grew larger, darker and more alive the deeper I went in.

I was born in Bonn. At twenty-three I moved to Düsseldorf for work, but what I wrote about is what came before. Circkool is a tribute to those Bonn years: to a community, to a place, and to friendships whose names I kept. No faraway kingdoms, only places you have actually been. A riverbank at the edge of town. A tarpaulin with faded glitter. A house where you have stopped being missed.

Why a circus? Because a circus is the one place where the impossible is allowed to happen in front of an audience. Two hundred people sit in the dark, watch fire come from bare hands and a boy float in the air, and applaud, because they take it for an act. If you are different, there is no better hiding place than the spotlight. Rian puts it more briefly in chapter 4: carnival.

But a circus is also the opposite of a hiding place. It lures. It offers people who have no place outside exactly what they need most: to be seen, to belong, a family. That is why I write dark fantasy in which safety is more dangerous than violence. The safest place and the most dangerous one are often the same.

And then the moon. A circus that has stood in the same spot in the Rheinaue for years and does not move on still needs a calendar. At Circkool, it is the full moon. Once a month, someone leaves the circus. The others call it luck. Where to, no one says.

The book is dedicated to my best friend Rian. Some people never really disappear. They stay on in stories.

Circkool is my debut and the start of a series. I write at night, because sentences are too polite by day. The curtain at the entrance is tied back. It stands open, both ways.

Feo can show things that are not there. A sparrow on Rian’s shoulder that tips its head once to the left and once to the right, the way sparrows do, and stays. In the book it is called illusion weaving. Rian calls him Pictureman.

I did not want a gift that makes its bearer stronger. I wanted one that makes him less certain. If you make fire, you know afterward what you did; it burns. If you make pictures, you never quite know. Feo’s gift shows him the world and lays something over it at the same time, and he can never be sure which part of it came from him. That is why, since February, he has been testing his reflection in the water below the willow. If the picture is right, he is still there.

The world has a word for what he is, and the word is madness. Three weeks in a clinic, a diagnosis that was wrong, pills that did nothing. A family that loves him and is afraid of him. All of that has already happened before the book begins. Feo has learned to make himself small.

And then a man stands in front of him who is the first not to tell him to stop. He says: “But you hold them hard. Try holding looser.” For someone who has spent years learning to be quiet, that is the most dangerous thing anyone can say.

The other characters follow the same workshop rule. Each has a want, a need, a guilt, a blind spot, a limit and a contradiction. And each one talks differently. One breaks off his sentences, one cuts hers short, one answers a question with a question. If you can swap two lines of dialogue without anyone noticing, the dialogue is not finished. Feo says less than he thinks.

Every gift in Circkool costs the body something. For Feo, it also costs the certainty that he can trust himself. What it costs him in the end is in the book.