Okay, so my previous suggestion was pretty much negated, which I expected. So I'm going to generalise a bit:

My hypothesis is that we are looking at one or more of the big important scenes the wrong way. The circus act, the Escape scene, all of them have enough room for ambiguity. It is entirely in Rich's style to plot a scene, expecting the audience to take it one way, only to flip it on its head.

So with that in mind, I more or less ask again: what would it mean if the circus scene was not quite how it appeared? If we didn't have to worry about the extreme reactions of the audience, for example. Or if some other aspect could be taken another way.

And for anyone who says that hypothesising without a specific idea in mind is pointless, this thread is going nowhere right now. You've basically listed every possible monster and grouped them by probability. So the point is to start with a fresh perspective. I don't know D&D, but I do know narratives, and I still think we're looking at something the wrong way.