I don’t know, man. It all felt very nosleep-ish to me, for good and for ill. Even the title itself is in that current very clickbait-y style, and its rather episodic with a lot of repetition of lines and ideas. 

Also, let me just say that I’ve never found clowns scary. I’ve actually always been a fan of clowns, as a shameless slapstick lover. There are exceptions, of course, such as Pennywise or the Killer Klowns, but that’s because they themselves are scary, apart from being a clown. Like, they’re not scary because they’re clowns, they’re scary because of what they do. Granted, this is a circus, and not just clowns, but I’ve always enjoyed those, too - apart from the insane animal cruelty, that is. And that’s nothing to say of the sickening horror of the ‘freak show,’ which is its own nightmare of barbarism. 

That being said, I did find the ending fairly effective, but a lot of that is because of my own personal experience, not the writing or the storytelling. I don’t mean to say that it’s bad book(actually a short novella), but it just didn’t really do anything for me. All in all, not very scary, but not awful, either.