Geek Love: A Novel

by Katherine Dunn

National Book Award Finalist • Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities—with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. 

As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

• ISBN10: 0375713344
• ISBN13: 9780375713347
• Publish Date: 11 June 2002 (first published 1 January 1920)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Vintage Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 368
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780375713347

Reviews

[brokentune]

DNF @ 60 pages.

Some books just aren't for me. This is one of them.
No rating, no regrets, but no more time spent on this one either.

[clementine]

I LOVED this book. It gripped me right from the beginning, promising to be twisted and gruesome. It didn't disappoint. It was horrifying and disturbing and very, very dark. There's nothing more terrifying than medical horror!

The story is a little slow to really begin, but Dunn leaves a trail of tantalizing hints so it's not boring. The drugs, the shooter, Miranda - everything makes you want to keep reading.

It's a testament to Dunn's writing that Arty is both absolutely despicable and yet somehow charming. He charmed me, the same way he charmed all the Arturans. Even though I knew I should hate him, I couldn't fully.

All the plot threads worked so well together - Miranda, Miss Lick, the Arturans, the twins' pregnancy. There was just enough shown to be creepy and just enough left to the imagination to be completely horrifying.

This is definitely going to be one of my favourites.

[ibeforem]

This is one of those books that I suspect caused quite a bit of buzz when it was released, but I’d never heard of it — probably because I was only 11. I wasn’t quite sure what to think when I started… A book about carny freaks is one thing, a book about carny freaks who purposefully produce children with physical defects is quite another. And oh, what those children do! As ridiculous as it may seem to think of someone voluntarily cutting off parts of their body in devotion to a (cult) leader, you know there’s enough crazy people in the world for it to be plausible.

Oly ends up being such an unexpectedly touching character, and definitely the strongest of them all.

I don’t think there’s a better way to depict the tone of this book and the twistedness than to post an excerpt.

In Oly’s voice: "I was born three years after my sisters. My father spared no expense in these experiments. My mother had been liberally dosed with cocaine, amphetamines, and arsenic during her ovulation and throughout her pregnancy with me. It was a disappointment when I emerged with such commonplace deformities. My albinism is the regular pink-eyed variety and my hump, though pronounced, is not remarkable in size or shape as humps go. My situation was far too humdrum to be marketable on the same scale as my brother’s and sisters’……The dwarfism, which was very apparent by my third birthday, came as a pleasant surprise to the patient pair and increased my value."