Flashback: Katherine Dunn’s ‘Geek Love’ should come with a warning

Nov 17

“This audacious, mesmerizing novel should carry a warning: ‘Reader Beware.’”—Publishers Weekly

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. 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.

When Geek Love was published in 1989, the novel received a lot of praise—and was a finalist for the National Book Award. The book’s author, Katherine Dunn (1945-2016), told Caitlin Roper at Willamette Week that she was surprised by the success of the book—which she’d spent nearly 10 years working on, far from the publishing world. “All the time I was working on Geek Love, it was like my own private autism,” she said. “I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.”

Geek Love
Katherine Dunn
Vintage
Categories: Humorous Literary Fiction, Contemporary American Fiction, Contemporary Literary Fiction

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Reviews

Geek Love has been a perennial best seller, and its cultural influence has been prodigious. The book has inspired and moved writers, artists, and performers to tell their own wild stories.—Geek Love at 25: How a Freak Family Inspired Your Pop Culture Heroes (Wired)
“The story is written in such an original and unique way, and it does, indeed, explore important issues and makes you think…”—My Review of Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (The Nerd Book Fairy)
“Geek Love is a cruel joke turned into a sensitive novel, but a sensitive novel played for laughs.”—The Marvelous Grotesquerie of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (LitHub)
“Some novels grow so popular that they overwhelm a writer’s career. Like one jagged peak in a range of well-proportioned hills, the novel towers over the author’s other books and holds them in shadow. For Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1989) is that novel. The epic saga of the Binewskis, a family of circus freaks, and the tragic fate of their traveling sideshow, Geek Love was a finalist for the National Book Award and has since inspired cultish devotion (just Google “Geek Love tattoos”). It has sold more than 475,000 copies in the United States alone.”—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Convict: Katherine Dunn’s cult classic, Geek Love, has eclipsed her debut, Attic, for too long. (The Atlantic)
“This audacious, mesmerizing novel should carry a warning: ‘Reader Beware.’ Those entering the world of carnival freaks described by narrator Olympia Binewski, a bald, humpbacked albino dwarf, will find no escape from a story at once engrossing and repellent, funny and terrifying, unreal and true to human nature. Dunn’s vivid, energetic prose, her soaring imagination and assured narrative skill fuse to produce an unforgettable tale.” (Publishers Weekly)

About the author

Katherine Dunn was a novelist and boxing journalist who lived and worked in Oregon. She wrote three novels: Attic; Truck; and Geek Love, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize. She died in 2016.

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Chris Well

Chris Well been a writer pretty much his entire life. (Well, since his childhood.) Over the years, he has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, and books. He now is the chief of the website Monster Complex, celebrating monster stories in lit and pop culture. He also writes horror comedy fiction that embraces Universal Monsters, 1960s sitcoms, 1980s action movies, and the X-Files.

https://chriswell.substack.com/