Name: Geek Love
Rating: 4.044303797468355 (79 reviews)
ISBN: 9780375713347

Katherine Dunn

Aloysious and Lillian Binewski, the proprietors of a traveling carnival, attempt to reduce overhead by breeding their own freak show, with tragic results, in a new edition of the acclaimed cult classic. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

Geek Love

Shoob 🧸

“Papa’s a genius,” I said stoutly. This was Binewski doctrine. 

“Heh heh heh,” went Arty’s belly. There was scorn in his eyes. It was familiar enough on his wide mug, but not toward Papa. He was trying to shock me. 

"If Papa had discovered fire," Arty sighed to the beat of his lifts, “he'd think it was for sticking in your mouth to amaze a crowd.... If Papa had invented the wheel ... he'd have laid it flat.. put a merry-go-round on it ... and figured that was as far as it went.... If he'd discovered America ... he would have gone home and forgot about it ... because it didn't have any hot-dog stands."

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 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 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.

A Novel

I don’t know whether to recommend this book or tell everyone to stay far away from it. It was long. It was suffocating. It was weird. It was so, so weird. 

Above all, Geek Love is immersive to the point of being cinematic. I could smell every location in this book. I could see every character in perfect detail and hear the timbre of their voices. The story could have been told in half the words had Katherine Dunn been willing to skimp on description but luckily she made no such sacrifice. 

A lot could be said about the themes of Geek Love, most notably the questions it proposes about religion, purpose, and the body. Some of these themes are engaged in a manner that I would call hyperbolic, but at a certain point it becomes farcically over the top in a way that circles back around to being genius. 

That’s why I’ll give it 4 stars even though the present-day timeline that takes up about a third of the book is painfully boring. Because that other two-thirds is so odd and unexpected and compelling. That present-day third does stick the landing in terms of theme and plot, the execution of it just dragged a bit for me on a pacing level. I’ll let it go, though. After some thought, yes, I recommend Geek Love and then when you read it let me know so we can talk about it. 

I don’t know whether to recommend this book or tell everyone to stay far away from it. It was long. It was suffocating. It was weird. It was so, so weird. 

Above all, Geek Love is immersive to the point of being cinematic. I could smell every location in this book. I could see every character in perfect detail and hear the timbre of their voices. The story could have been told in half the words had Katherine Dunn been willing to skimp on description but luckily she made no such sacrifice. 

A lot could be said about the themes of Geek Love, most notably the questions it proposes about religion, purpose, and the body. Some of these themes are engaged in a manner that I would call hyperbolic, but at a certain point it becomes farcically over the top in a way that circles back around to being genius. 

That’s why I’ll give it 4 stars even though the present-day timeline that takes up about a third of the book is painfully boring. Because that other two-thirds is so odd and unexpected and compelling. That present-day third does stick the landing in terms of theme and plot, the execution of it just dragged a bit for me on a pacing level. I’ll let it go, though. After some thought, yes, I recommend Geek Love and then when you read it let me know so we can talk about it. 

3.5 stars

wow.

"Sometimes just looking at Al and Crystal Lil I wanted to bash their heads with a tire iron. Not to kill them, just to wake them up."

Geek Love

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