Will I love Geek Love?

Risk-taking writers are my heroes, and Katherine Dunn is at the top of my list.

Her astonishing book Geek Love, a cult classic, defiantly celebrates the freakish and bizarre, tearing to shreds the subjective and culturally determined definitions of normality, intelligence, and beauty. Dive into Geek Love, and you’ll be traveling with the Binewski family, owners of the “Carnival Fabulon,” whose “special” offspring are prized for their money-making monstrous endowments.

In creating Oly, an albino hunchback, or her brother Arty, born with flippers, or Chick, with telekinetic powers, Dunn risks alienating readers by turning her characters into stereotypes, comic… show more.

There’s a reason this book is a classic. I read it a number of years ago and reread it last year—it holds up exceedingly well.

The author’s depiction of the parents who take drugs with the intention of having malformed children they can showcase is a great setup, but it’s the character of Arturo the Aquaboy, in all his grandiosity, power, and neediness, that is compelling and resonates so today.

I know, I know…this is a book you’re either going to love or hate, and it’s probably on a lot of lists. I love this book because before it was as common to “break the rules” and write frankly about taboo subjects, Katherine Dunn dove headfirst into an ocean of taboo and told a story that’s as exquisitely heart-wrenching as it is ghastly.

Despite her flaws (and I mean flaws in character–I don’t consider her physical traits to be flawed at all), the protagonist, Oly, is driven by devotion to her family as much as anything.

A dear friend gave me this book many moons ago, and it is still one of my favorite titles for understanding feelings. Unlike the other books on my list, this is a fiction novel, but the themes of knowing and accepting oneself are so courageously interweaved in this story that I would be amiss not to include it here.

I find the darker undertones of this book more aligned with my understanding of human nature and emotions. We tend to overly focus on joyful feelings when there is so much more to be learned from exploring the full range of… show more.

Geek Love is one of the strangest, most fascinating, and thoroughly unsettling novels I’ve ever read. It tells the story of a carny family whose mother and father breed their own exhibit of human oddities with the help of a variety of illicit drugs, insecticides, and radioisotopes. I’ve certainly felt freakish at times, but compared to the Binewski spawn—a boy with flippers, a hunchbacked albino dwarf, resplendent piano-playing Siamese twins, and Fortunato, the normal-looking baby who has telekinetic powers—I feel downright ordinary! The story is beautiful, shocking, repulsive, exhilarating, and deeply moving all at once, and might challenge your conceptions… show more.

This one is a bit of a stretch but hear me out: This is one of my all-time favorite books. It is a twisted story of a circus family and their experiences with racism, sexism, cults, body dysmorphia, and many other issues. One (or two) of the main characters is a set of Siamese twins, joined at the hip, who play the piano with four hands as part of their circus act. The book isn’t explicitly about music, but music plays into the epic and amazing story about equality. 

Geek Love subverts the American dream in the best and most disturbing way, outlining the “horror of normalcy” in a story about parents who run a carnival and literally breed their children to be circus freaks, from conjoined twins to a girl with a pig tail to Arturo the Aqua boy—complete with flippers. These children of the carnival take pride in their freakishness, in their unusual bodies, though the story takes increasingly dark twists and turns that will make you unable to put it down…I became so engrossed in it during my initial read that I stayed up till… show more.

I have yet to meet someone who doesn't love this novel, though I'm sure there must be plenty of Amazon reviewers that hate it. Katherine Dunn's masterpiece chronicles the Binewskis, a drug-addled carny family who set out to breed their own circus freaks. Hilarity, violence, sibling rivalry, and all manner of insanity ensues as the reader encounters, among others, Arturo the Aquaboy, Siamese twins, and an albino hunchback. What else can I say? It's wonderful, funny, and unsettling in equal measure, and as epic a family story as anything Steinbeck undertook.