In Wrenn's unpublished novel, The Circus is very much like Helms' political organization, the National Congressional Club. Will Patton is modeled on Tom Ellis, the Raleigh attorney who was Helms' leading strategist. Jed Stanhausen is like former Gov. Jim Holshouser.

'The South has a long and storied past of political machines. The Byrd Machine in Virginia, the Thurmond Machine in South Carolina, the Talmadge, Wallace and Long Machines in Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana. In the fullness of time, none of them would ever match The Circus except, maybe, Huey Long.'

'That morning when he walked into the building Stanhausen had his whole political career in front of him. That night after that political assassination, when he climbed into his limousine his career was over. Jed Stanhausen would never run for office again.' In real life, Holshouser, North Carolina's first GOP governor of the century, was booed at the 1976 state Republican convention and kept from becoming a delegate to the national convention because he backed the re-election of President Gerald Ford and not his challenger, Ronald Reagan.

'But Jubal had no interest in -- and if the truth be told no need for -- college. ... What he missed was that Jubal didn't need muscles or brains (at least of the college intellectual variety) because he had something better. He had cunning. Ruthless, unfettered-by-conscience, redneck cunning.'

'You don't meet many bone-deep, soul on fire, true fanatics in this world. You meet even fewer who are geniuses. Will Patton was a man with a creed and he wanted to carve it into the law in stone like the Ten Commandments. All he had to do was get Jubal elected first.'

'So, Jubal ran for the Senate and from that day on he and Will Patton were strapped together like Ahab and the whale. Each needed the other, each hated needing the other, they clashed like two riptides, whirled and churned and boiled like two whirlpools, and God help the innocent man who got caught between them.'

'Sex is ongoing, endemic and unstoppable in a campaign. And there are good reasons for that. Campaigns are made up of young people -- and they like sex. But campaigns are also conducive to sex in more subtle ways. They break down the normal social barriers which keep men and women apart.'

'A flyer is just a simple piece of paper -- a handbill -- but it is living proof words are more lethal than bullets. A flyer almost never has anything good to say about anyone. It's bare-knuckled, raw bones politics; it's a body slam, a dagger to the heart, a knife beneath the ribs. Will Patton loved flyers.'

'Race was like a lot of things in the South. One way or the other we'd been fighting over it among ourselves -- and with just about everyone else -- for over two hundred years. So, there wasn't anyone who didn't have an opinion. You just had to mention Martin Luther King or the NAACP in a roomful of people and every man, woman and child over twelve saw red one way or the other. There was no neutral ground. But if a politician knew the terrain -- and if he was clever -- being called a racist didn't hurt him at all. It helped him. Because everyone who had opposed busing had been called a racist at one time or another.'