Word: lao
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...CIRCUS OF DR. LAO...
...blurb on the garishly illustrated cover. "See the werewolf turn into a real flesh-and-blood woman-right before your very eyes." This pitchman's approach, aimed at newsstand buyers of books on the occult, is misleading, for the product, a slim volume entitled The Circus of Dr. Lao, is no tawdry sci-fi thriller. It is instead a blending of the sardonic style of Ambrose Bierce and the homespun hyperbole of Mark Twain...
Circus tells a tale that could happen only in America. A circus, under the direction of an apparently ageless Chinese named Dr. Lao, arrives one day in the town of Abalone, Ariz., and delivers delights that even Barnum would have hedged at promising. "The world is my idea," says Dr. Lao. "As such I present it to you." The circus, a metaphor for his world, is half dream, half nightmare. In its sideshow tents a puritanical schoolteacher is seduced by a syrinx-playing satyr, a gorgon turns an unbelieving harridan into "carnelian chalcedony," one of the harder varieties of building...
...these offerings impress the Abaloneans? Not on your tintype. Their expectations run more to trained-seal acts and Bobo the Dog-faced Boy, and their minds are thus unconditioned to accept such wonders. True members of the American booboisie, they heckle Dr. Lao and his magician during the performance and walk silently out into the hard Arizona sunlight when it is over. One suspects that Sinclair Lewis' Main Streeters might have done much the same thing...
...when Author Charles Finney created him as a character in the novel The Circus of Dr. Lao, Frank Tull was considered to be, at most, the product of a fertile imagination. Yet, less than 40 years later, the concept of semi-artificial man no longer seems as farfetched. Though modern medicine has yet to produce a real-life counterpart of television's Six Million Dollar Man* it has developed workable replacements for many important body parts, and is steadily moving toward the day when hospitals may well have to follow the lead of auto-repair shops and add spare...