Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

A National Book Award Finalist: This 'wonderfully descriptive' novel from an author with a 'tremendous imagination' tells the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias have bred their own exhibit of human oddities. (The New York Times Book Review)

The Binewskis arex a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). 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 US, 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.

Praise for Geek Love

'If Flannery O'Connor had consumed vast quantities of LSD, she might have written like this' Literary Review

'The most romantic novel about love and family I have read. It made me ashamed to be so utterly normal' Terry Gilliam

'I felt electrocuted when I read that first page with Crystal Lil and her freak brood. I stood there in the bookstore and my jaw came unhinged. No book I've read, before or since, has given me that specific jolt' Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia

Reviewed by ibeforem on

4 of 5 stars

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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."

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 5 December, 2007: Finished reading
  • 5 December, 2007: Reviewed