Published in 2011 (first published 1989)
348 pages
Katherine Dunn was a novelist and boxing journalist who lived and worked in Oregon. She is the author of the three novels: Attic; Truck; and Geek Love. Her most well-known work, Geek Love, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize for horror fiction. She also authored the essay collection One Ring Circus. She died in 2016.
What is this book about?
Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out—with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes—to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s 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.
