The Circus of Dr Lao is presented in an oversize 6 1/2 × 10 inches format. This edition features an introduction by Stefan Dziemianowicz, 11 bonus stories, new artwork by David Ho appearing as a series of cards, new color works by Matthew Jaffe, reprints of the entire Lao-related artwork by Boris Artzybasheff, reprints of the illustrations by Gordon Noel Fish, a gallery of old paperback and hardcover covers of previous editions, printed endpapers, ribbon marker, and color sections printed on Mohawk Superfine paper. The book is bound in full Dutch cloth, blind stamped on the front, and wrapped in a dustjacket by David Ho. This volume features much of Finney’s fantastic fiction.

The circus rolls magically into the sleepy desert town of Abalone. The townspeople are disappointed to discover that it consists of only three cars, but those cars are crammed with a retinue of performers and a menagerie of creatures. Some of the townspeople respond with disappointment, expecting the kind of circus they knew from their childhoods. Some are befuddled, unable to determine whether one of the cages holds a bear or a Russian, and when they cannot reconcile themselves to the sea serpent, the gorgon, and other mythical creatures that Dr Lao boards in place of the usual circus animals, they dismiss them as fakes or freaks. Some are profoundly affected by their encounter with the circus, notably reserved schoolteacher Agnes Birdsong, whose dalliance with the circus’s satyr awakens her own repressed sexuality.

“I don’t do tricks,” the sideshow seer Apollonius tells an audience member. “I do magic. I create; I transpose; I color; I transubstantiate; I break up; I recombine.” Dr Lao’s circus is a funhouse mirror held up to its audience to show that its sideshow attractions are no more freakish than the people who gape at them.

As Ray Bradbury wrote: “The Circus of Dr Lao’s cargo of mythological beasts approaches, as did Hawthorne, Melville, and countless others, the enigma of good and evil, the real and the romantic, shakes the reader severely, threatens some of his most cherished conceptions, and departs having offered no cure-all solutions. The reader, like the inhabitants of the small desert town, is left with a strewn jigsaw which he must fit together in his own time, according to his own temper, believing or disbelieving the entire menageries, depending on his real or romantic needs.”