The plot involves a mad scientist attempting to create life, an even madder evil priest, played with charismatic flamboyance by Mr. Bock, as well as the scientist's blond naïf of a wife and the handsome automaton produced by his laboratory experiments.
Clown's inspirations are "the original comic-book Joker, not the new Heath Ledger one – but without being mad and evil.
Meanwhile, Joker emerges as the antihero of the story – it is his origin that we learn in the flashbacks, which explain that he turned mad and evil because of "one bad day" (his pregnant wife died).
He has radically influenced the way we look at Shakespeare: after Brook's Lear, with its train of riotous knights, it became impossible to ever again see the play as a black-and-white affair about a good king driven mad by evil daughters.
Disaster follows disaster, and in its final third the novel takes on a kitchen-sink effect, with a parade of witches, ghosts, mad mobs, evil fathers, flagellants, devil worshipers, nice but dour Puritan girls turned into whores, stabbings and general mayhem.
I never gave a fig for the ideologies, unless they were mad or evil.
Williams, who is also the founder of the Stay Strong Foundation, adds, "No one is born bad, mad or evil.
But, as many evil and mad scientists find out, there's a price to pay for such determination: In his quest for universal dominance, Evil essentially abandoned his son, Scott, deepening the rocky gorge of emotions between evil scientist and son.
