I read the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (which was awesome) last year and I realized that part of why I enjoyed it so much was because the story dealt with fringe society. By fringe society, I am referring to subculture-like things that form in reponse to a fringe hobby/activity. For example, I am (or was) a member of at least one fringe society: mountain bikers. Mountain bikers have their own set of slang terms, behavioral patterns, and spending/eating habits. How many people would call a $2,000 bike 'mid-level'? Mountain bikers, that's who.

The fringe society in Kavalier in Clay was the comic book society. All my life I have been exposed to comic books in no special way. I was born too long after comic books showed up to witness their rise, but I have seen them leak into cartoons and movies. Little did I know how much happened beneath the surface to fuel the comic book revolution. And little did I know it was such an art.

For some reason I really enjoy reading about sub-cultures and fringe societies. I guess it could be that I feel better knowing that there are people who did useful things with their fringe hobbies, while I haven't done jack with mine.

In an effort to continue on my fringe-society-binge, I took a trip to a local bookchainstore to find a new fringe socity to learn about. I wanted a book like Kavalier and Clay, a book set in a different era that involved a fringe society, with a group of characters navigating through the twists and turns of the times. Whether or not the story was fictional was not an issue, but I did want historical accuracy.

I got lucky and stumbled upon a book with a cover more cartoony and outrageous than Kavalier and clay's, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark. The cover depicted a female tiger tamer in a cage, with lions prancing and flying from left to right, while she stands calmly in the middle with two whips. I was reminded of the people on airport runways that wave their arms around to direct the lumbering lumbering steel birds to their proper place.

I went home and performed some impromptu research: the book is about the most famous female tiger trainer in history (American, at least). The setting is the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus during the 1910s and '20s. The back of the book says "Mabel Stark was five feet tall, brazen, suicidally courageous, obsessed with tigers, and sexually eccentric."

Looks like 'fringe society' might be too tame a term in this case.