Circus Mind

by M.C. Mars

Mars’ tale centers on three San Franciscans at the ends of their Alice Bailey Crowley, a 60-year-old cabdriver with failing eyesight who lives in a camp for unhoused people; Khozzmkk Emcee, a Punjabi Mexican American Lyft driver and aspiring rapper; and RL Sims, a squirrely cabdriver and Vietnam veteran who passionately hates ride-hailing services. Bailey hangs herself after she’s told that her granddaughter has drowned, and Khozzmkk and RL both perish in a road-rage incident that ends in gunfire; the trio’s etheric bodies go to Circus Mind, a magical role-playing video game produced by Over Soul, Inc. It’s essentially the afterlife, drawing on elements of Hindu and Buddhist belief. There, the three endure hellish illusions, get counsel from a spirit guide called the Duke of Joe, and learn that they’re but three different facets of a single higher-dimensional being. Khozzmkk and RL get reincarnated—by a gizmo called the Great Karmonic Accelerator—in late-19th-century New York, and the narrative follows Khozzmkk’s adventures as a Black cabdriver who frequently faces racist affronts but raps exuberantly to his passengers, who include modernist poet Ezra Pound. The stakes of their new lives are Unless RL and Khozzmkk work off the bad karma from previous existences, they and Bailey, who’s still in Circus Mind, could be reincarnated as bacteria.
Mars’ yarn unusually combines hip-hop–flavored realism with colorful fantasy and Eastern spiritual themes of empathy and self-restraint. He’s a talented writer whose prose is punchy and evocative...The fantasy sections, in particular, are wildly inventive, with the sardonic, surreal quality of a William S. Burroughs hallucination...
—Kirkus Review

352 pages, Hardcover

Published September 7, 2022

About the author

M.C. Mars is the author of DON'T TAKE ME THE LONG WAY, his memoir of driving a cab at night in San Francisco for twenty- four years. In 2012, he released his second book, BURNER. He’s also a rapper with three albums to his credit, and hip-hop roots that go all the way back to the late 70s. He lives in San Francisco, where he continues to perfect his free- style, and his spaghetti sauce.