| Title | Geek Love |
| Author | Katherine Dunn |
| Type | Novel, Domestic Fiction |
| Year of Publication | 1989 |
| Language | English |
| File Format | |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Rating | Click to rate this post! [Total: 1 Average: 5] |
Geek Love is a novel by Katherine Dunn, published in its entirety by Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House) in 1989. Dunn published parts of the novel in Mississippi Mud Book of Days (1983) and Looking Glass Bookstore Review (1988). She was a finalist for the National Book Award.
The novel is the story of a traveling carnival directed by Aloysius “Al” Binewski and his wife “Crystal” Lil, and their children, seen through the eyes of their daughter Olympia (“Oly”) who writes the family history of their daughter Miranda. When the business begins to fail, the couple devises an idea to create their own monster show, using various drugs and radioactive material to alter their children’s genes. The results are Arturo (“Arty”, also known as “Aqua Boy”), a boy with fins for hands and feet; Electra (“Elly”) and Iphigenia (“Iphy”), Siamese twins; Olympia (“Oly”), a humpback albino dwarf; and Fortunato (“Chick”), the normal-looking baby in the family with telekinetic powers.
Table of Contents
Book Summary
Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a fleshy family whose maternal and paterfamilias families set out, with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes, to breed their own display of human oddities. There’s Arthur the Aquaboy, who has limb fins and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan. . . Iphy and Elly, the smooth Siamese twins. . . the albino hunchback Oly and the apparently normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the most precious and dangerous asset in the family.
As the Binewski operates in the backwaters of the US, inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; As its members carry out their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love sheds its sulfurous light on our notions of the strange and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.
Book Review
Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a fleshy family whose families and paterfamilias departed, with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes, to breed their own display of human oddities. There’s Arthur the Aquaboy, who has limb fins and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan. . . Iphy and Elly, the smooth Siamese twins. . . the albino hunchback Oly and the apparently normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the most precious and dangerous asset in the family.
As the Binewski operates in the backwaters of the US, inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; As its members lead their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, “Geek Love casts its sulfurous light on our notions of the strange and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.
About The Author of The Book Katherine Dunn
Katherine Dunn was a novelist and boxing journalist who lived and worked in Oregon. She is the author of three novels―Attic; Truck; and Geek Love, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize―as well as the essay collection One Ring Circus. She died in 2016.
Geek Love PDF
Geek Love Quotes
The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone’s comfort.
They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.
When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.
A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
