Geek Love

GEEK LOVE is the story of Binewski's Fabulon, a traveling carnival owned and operated by Al and Lily Binewski. In the early days of the carnival, there isn't a lot of money to pay carnival performers; so Al and Lily decide to breed their own freak show. Lily intentionally uses illegal drugs, insecticides, and even radioisotopes during her pregnancies, and after several failed attempts (which are on display in the carnival's museum, floating in formaldehyde, their deformities revealed in all their grotesque glory), she has four successes: Arturo (aka "The Aqua Boy"), a head and torso with flippers instead of arms and legs; Iphigenia and Electra, beautiful twins who share a common set of legs; Olympia, a bald, hunch-backed albino dwarf; and the youngest, Chick, who looks like a "norm" on the outside but has telekinetic powers that are both opportune and catastrophic for the Binewski family. Olympia is our narrator, guiding us through the freaky and fantastical world of GEEK LOVE. But it's Oly's brother, Arty, who's really at the center of the story. Arty is power-hungry, malicious, bitter, calculating, jaggedly jealous. He thinks only of self-preservation, and, as a result, he can be undeniably charismatic. He's so magnetic, in fact, that he establishes his own cult. He calls his followers "The Arturans," and he preaches salvation through the sacrifice of body parts. Olympia, for her part, is desperately in love with Arty, and she's content to be his slave, to fulfill his every wish. With Chick's help, she becomes pregnant with Arty's child--a daughter, Miranda, who is completely normal but for a curling little tail. The novel follows two storylines: the one during Oly's childhood and adolescence with the carnival; and a present-day storyline in which Oly lives in the same building as her beautiful daughter, an artist who has no idea that the grotesque hunchback she's so desperate to draw is her mother. In the pages of GEEK LOVE, nothing is off-limits: You'll meet geeks and freaks, a surgeon who joined the Fabulon after performing abdominal surgery on herself, a 26-pound newborn, hundreds of redheads, "The Bag Man," a reporter-turned-maggot-salesman, an heir to a travel-dinner fortune who has a very interesting way of helping people, and more. GEEK LOVE is at once disgusting and morbidly fascinating, bizarre and relentlessly real, repugnant and engrossing. It'll repel you and entice you, keep you riveted and make you squeamish, break your heart and give you hope, incite within you sympathy and sorrow. There's beauty in the ugliness of it, and ugliness in the beauty of it. There are no happy endings here: just a visceral, relentless look at life on the fringe for those "freaks" we objectify and slink away from in disgust and horror. The narrative itself is imaginative and seamless; the prose is brutally raw. Dunn's novel asks us to do some soul-searching and face the little freak that lives in all of us, whether or not we're "norms

It was Douglas E. Winter who said, "Horror is not a genre, it is an emotion." With that bold and all-too-true statement ringing in your ears, I will tell you that "Geek Love" is a horror story. The protagonists are not simply trapped by their physical deformities, but also by their own familial love and the malevolent manipulation from one who is of them. The majority of the story is told by Olympia Binewski, born into a carnival family of intentional freaks. Al and "Crystal Lil" Binewski set about starting their family with one intention; additions to the carnival's attractions. Lily takes illegal drugs, insecticides, and even radioisotopes in order to purposefully "give their children the gift of making money just by being themselves." In other words, they create a family of horribly deformed children, their own freak show. Arturo, known as Aqua Boy, is the first of their children to survive. He is a torso with flippers for arms and legs. Second born are the Siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia, two perfect torsos rising up from one set of hips and legs, stunningly beautiful despite their deformity. Olympia herself is the third living child, a hunchback albino dwarf, she is considered to be too commonplace to be useful but is kept anyway. The youngest child, Fortunato, called Chick, was almost left on a doorstep for being normal when his telekinetic powers were discovered. Kept in what was called "The Chute", in glass display jars, were the children of Al and Lily that did not live, yet kept as attractions in the Binewski Fabulon Carnival. Dunn's tale of quiet, creeping horror takes place in two separate time frames, Olympia's childhood with the carnival and a present day encounter with the daughter who doesn't know her. The "present-day" storyline is a bit weak, stilted and practically unfeeling in its telling, but Olympia's childhood with the Fabulon is wrought with deeply impacting emotions of fear, hate, bitterness, happiness...and love. From the quietly acquiescing Olympia to the independence of the twins to the narcissistic brutality of Arturo, and the gentle genius of Chick, you love and hate the Binewski's as you find yourself completely engulfed in their strange world. Arturo performs in a fish tank, and the twins take piano and singing lessons to entertain the crowds, while Olympia basically becomes a slave to her brother Arturo. But Arturo is not satisfied simply swimming in a tank, and with the help of an underwater sound device and his very own gift of speech, begins to mesmerize the crowds and forms a cult around himself. A deadly cult of self-mutilation and butchery that called themselves Arturans rises up to follow the Aqua Boy, including a questionable physician called Dr. Phyllis, who joined the carnival after performing abdominal surgery on herself in her dorm room. You will meet Horst, the cat man and his tigers; Zephir McGurk, who tries to sell Arturo a strange device and winds out joining the Arturans; No

I couldn't put this book down, and carried it around for about a week, deeply and happily immersed. But, just for comparison, when I showed it to my boyfriend and he read the back cover, he physically recoiled and hastily handed it back to me. Funnily enough, he enjoys true-crime books/programs, and I can't stand the things. I think it's the same impulse though: we feel that these things, though repulsive to many, have things to teach us about human nature. With that in mind, I have to commend Katherine Dunn for a very well written, memorable, and thought-provoking book -- with the disclaimer it is absolutely not for everyone. Basically, if you are armed with the knowledge that the book is about a family of circus freaks (including a fish-boy with no real limbs, siamese twins, and an albino dwarf, all purposely bred for birth defects with the use of drugs and radiation), and you are assured that ***it only gets worse from there***, and you still find yourself curious, then for goodness sake go out and get the book right now, because it delivers everything you would want except perhaps for a happy ending. While I find writers like Chuck Palanuik and Bret Easton Ellis to be smug and shallow (there goes my reviewer rating!) I find them to be the only comparison to this book for actual shock value. I can't remember the last time I was actually shocked, not disturbed but shocked, at a book, and without being inclined to throw it out the window. The amount of humanity and vibrancy in these characters despite their ugly and often cruel natures kept me riveted. Highly recommended, for those with strong stomachs.

The most original book I've ever encountered. Ms. Dunn creates a fantastic world of odd charcters, one which will not only shock and disturb you, but also make you laugh. I'm currently reading it for the second time and enjoying it even more than the first. I'd recommend this book to any adventurous reader...no matter what your final opinion, it will definitely stay with you and make you think.

That sounds melodramatic, but I've never been so moved by a story, or placed so much emotional investment into fictional characters. I first encountered this novel in college Freshman English. This is one of those books where you either get it or you don't get it. Most of the other students, cheerleader types fresh off the high school boat, didn't get it. They found it unneccessarily "gross and crude", as well as "just weird". Our instructor was generally chastised by his class for being into stupid, bizarre literature. I, on the other hand, spent the whole semester obsessing over "Geek Love", reading it at least three times and underlining favorite phrases, like "inchy little marks like the hesitation cuts on a suicide's wrist." I found Dunn's writing courageous, ingenious, delicious. So poetic in it's monstrosity, so lovely in it's ugliness. I loved her humane monsters, hated her monstrous humans, and discovered that the more I read, the less I could tell the difference between them. My concern and involvement in Oly's life almost scared me. I obsessed over the importance of color in the novel. My crumpled paperback copy is filled with pencil marks noting each time "red" or "green" is mentioned. In the end I felt drained, but inspired. Katherine Dunn altered my ideas about how far to go with an image. She showed me beauty can be created from ugliness, profound thoughts can spring from crude words. All I can say to her is "Thank you."