Customer Reviews

Geek Love

5 star:		(174)
4 star:		(62)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

I couldn't put this book down, and carried it around for about a week, deeply and happily immersed. But, just for comparison, when I showed it to my boyfriend and he read the back cover, he physically recoiled and hastily handed it back to me. Funnily enough, he enjoys true-crime books/programs, and I can't stand the things. I think it's the same impulse though: we feel that these things, though repulsive to many, have things to teach us about human nature. With that in mind, I have to commend Katherine Dunn for a very well written, memorable, and thought-provoking book -- with the disclaimer it is absolutely not for everyone.

Basically, if you are armed with the knowledge that the book is about a family of circus freaks (including a fish-boy with no real limbs, siamese twins, and an albino dwarf, all purposely bred for birth defects with the use of drugs and radiation), and you are assured that ***it only gets worse from there***, and you still find yourself curious, then for goodness sake go out and get the book right now, because it delivers everything you would want except perhaps for a happy ending.

While I find writers like Chuck Palanuik and Bret Easton Ellis to be smug and shallow (there goes my reviewer rating!) I find them to be the only comparison to this book for actual shock value. I can't remember the last time I was actually shocked, not disturbed but shocked, at a book, and without being inclined to throw it out the window. The amount of humanity and vibrancy in these characters despite their ugly and often cruel natures kept me riveted. Highly recommended, for those with strong stomachs.

It was Douglas E. Winter who said, "Horror is not a genre, it is an emotion." With that bold and all-too-true statement ringing in your ears, I will tell you that "Geek Love" is a horror story. The protagonists are not simply trapped by their physical deformities, but also by their own familial love and the malevolent manipulation from one who is of them.

The majority of the story is told by Olympia Binewski, born into a carnival family of intentional freaks. Al and "Crystal Lil" Binewski set about starting their family with one intention; additions to the carnival's attractions. Lily takes illegal drugs, insecticides, and even radioisotopes in order to purposefully "give their children the gift of making money just by being themselves." In other words, they create a family of horribly deformed children, their own freak show.

Arturo, known as Aqua Boy, is the first of their children to survive. He is a torso with flippers for arms and legs. Second born are the Siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia, two perfect torsos rising up from one set of hips and legs, stunningly beautiful despite their deformity. Olympia herself is the third living child, a hunchback albino dwarf, she is considered to be too commonplace to be useful but is kept anyway. The youngest child, Fortunato, called Chick, was almost left on a doorstep for being normal when his telekinetic powers were discovered. Kept in what was called "The Chute", in glass display jars, were the children of Al and Lily that did not live, yet kept as attractions in the Binewski Fabulon Carnival.

Dunn's tale of quiet, creeping horror takes place in two separate time frames, Olympia's childhood with the carnival and a present day encounter with the daughter who doesn't know her. The "present-day" storyline is a bit weak, stilted and practically unfeeling in its telling, but Olympia's childhood with the Fabulon is wrought with deeply impacting emotions of fear, hate, bitterness, happiness...and love.

From the quietly acquiescing Olympia to the independence of the twins to the narcissistic brutality of Arturo, and the gentle genius of Chick, you love and hate the Binewski's as you find yourself completely engulfed in their strange world. Arturo performs in a fish tank, and the twins take piano and singing lessons to entertain the crowds, while Olympia basically becomes a slave to her brother Arturo.

But Arturo is not satisfied simply swimming in a tank, and with the help of an underwater sound device and his very own gift of speech, begins to mesmerize the crowds and forms a cult around himself. A deadly cult of self-mutilation and butchery that called themselves Arturans rises up to follow the Aqua Boy, including a questionable physician called Dr. Phyllis, who joined the carnival after performing abdominal surgery on herself in her dorm room.

You will meet Horst, the cat man and his tigers; Zephir McGurk, who tries to sell Arturo a strange device and winds out joining the Arturans; Norval Sanderson, a reporter who exposes Arturo's cult and then joins the carnival to sell maggots; Vern Bogner, a madman who eventually becomes "The Bag Man"; and the numerous Redheads who tends the carnival's food and game stands.

From languid childhood afternoons to horrifying parking lot murderers, from close-knit family story times to vicious sibling rivalry, Geek Love is anything but dull or boring. Innocence at the beginning, trepidation in the middle, heartbreak at the end, all stirred in with the tendrils of horror that creep from the pages and bite unexpectedly, Dunn has managed to puncture my mind and my flesh with this expertly crafted story.

Powerful, heartbreaking, maddening, frustrating, sickening, fascinating, repugnant and yet alluring, Geek Love is a tightly written masterpiece of finding beauty in sewers, and putrescence in that which glitters. Any book that stirs my love/hate passions as deeply as Geek Love deserves to receive my highest recommendation. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. Enjoy!

Much like its subject matter, the side show "freak", this book can be ugly and disturbing, but it is impossible to turn away. Told from the viewpoint of the bald, Albino, hunchback dwarf daughter of a mother who deliberately took drugs and chemicals to give birth to freaks for the family carnival, the narration can be incredibly calm in the midst of the storm. The parents, who run a freak show and have freak children for fun and profit, have a son with flippers, and daughters who are Siamese twins, and a seemingly normal son who has telekinesis. Katherine Dunn's imagination is frightening. The story runs the gamut from gratuitous violence to incest to rape and murder. I could not wait to finish the book, but once I did, I never wanted to read it again. I was disturbed, confused, intrigued. There are some gaping holes in the story, you have to suspend disbelief, and the concurrent story about the woman who disfigures beautiful women with battery acid is downright chilling. But, it certainly captures your interest. It is unique, and I, personally, had seen nothing of its type before. It's difficult for me to say whether I recommended it. I can only say proceed with caution; it is engrossing and also terribly un-nerving.

How surprised was I to hear some book called Geek Love(?) come so highly recommended, and who'd of ever thought I'd read it?... Then find me thinking, "I'm not finding this as disturbing or shocking as it seems set up to be," enthralled though I am... Apart from it's subject matter GL seemed familiar, similar to other works in several ways: writing style, theme, writer's trickery. Comparisons come easy and are valid. Yet this work stands, for me, very much on it's own, and the reading experience suggests it's greater than the sum of it's parts. Maybe it was a philosophy that hooked me (and then came Fight Club... ), or just some magic that I'm not sharp enough to identify. Eventually I discovered my jaw extended, telling me I could be surprised, that I wasn't immune. Oftentimes it was the complete, complex psychologies that impressed me most, and the work suffered when such details were half-baked. In Geek Love's world we may need to suspend much disbelief, but overall I found Dunn's logic surprisingly intricate. Her storytelling I found very effective, ever captivating, pulling me forward, forward, forward, while her "lyric" prose was there entertaining me throughout. Though I wanted at times to take a break (just to breathe, shake off the obsession,and assess: do I really like this book so incredibly much? do I LOVE this book??), I honestly felt rather powerless to slow down. I was also feeling uncharacteristically co-dependent: wanting everybody to read this book, at least talk to me about it, or ask questions, just please be interested too! please? I'll keep my criticisms from contaminating others' experience, but even halfway through, when I was able too pull myself away and relax, I found myself thinking about the book often and eager to spend time reading. Closing the book I may have lost some of my earlier enthusiasm, yet... find me turning back to that most marvelous of beginnings... I am satisfied, and for a time, however brief, I've awakened a bit more love, certainly compassion, for all you individual strangers that I pass out there on the streets of the real (flesh and blood) world. somethings persist: I hope everybody reads this book.

I read this book way back when it was brand new and in hardback. My (now ex)wife spotted it at a bookstore (thanks to a neon cover), and the title was enough for us. She read it first, and knowing my tastes (or lack thereof), handed it to me when she was finshed. I'm forever grateful. I couldn't remember having more fun reading a book. This is one for the same crowd that digs "Eraserhead" (or its milder David Lynch sibling, "Twin Peaks") or any of the John Waters exercises in depravity. If you thought that "Twin Peaks" was stupid, you'll quite possibly read this book and wonder how ANYBODY could have enjoyed it (that is, if you make it past the first twenty pages).

Part of the fun I had, though, was diving into the book with no real knowledge of what to expect. Heck, the original jacket didn't even have an illustration (as I recall, all I knew up front was that it had SOMETHING to do with a family that bred its own circus freaks). To that end, I think that the reviews do something of a disservice to the potential customer. Part of the joy of this work is seeing what kind of crazy thing will happen next. My advice is as follows. If, after reading this review (and getting a vague idea of what level of good taste NOT to expect), you're thinking about reading Geek Love, do yourself a favor. Don't read any more reviews. Just buy the darn book!

The first chapter or so blew me away.. I was hooked, and I had to finish it, but I got madder as I did so. This book promises a great deal, without following through.

Yes, it examines the question of who is normal and who isn't. But it fails to really face reality about this issue. The disabilities that produce disfigurements, like Siamese twinhood and having flippers instead of limbs, aren't a pain merely because society treats you as different: they can't be wished away just by growing up in a society that values them.

I got tired of the nastiness, trashiness and sadism of many of the main characters in this novel. I liked Oly and Miranda and that was about it. But it was just too easy to be repulsed by many of the other people, disfigured and not, in the book. For example, from practically the start of it, I was waiting eagerly for Arty to die. By the time he did, I was downright impatient.

Really good books leave me feeling transformed. This book, while it was technically very good and very gripping, just left me feeling kind of yucky. I can see where you might have your attitudes altered if you had never had to really deal with disability in your life. But I have, and I don't think this book helps matters.

...and that's sad because the plot is contrived and falls flat. But lord almighty, this book picks you up by the throat and shakes you around a bit before it wanders off in search of dramatic endings.

(Warning! Plot spoilers ahead!) The best reason to read this book is for the question it raises--just who is normal, and who is a monster? We are treated to several characters with varying degrees of physical and/or mental grotesqueness, but who is more of a freak--the siamese twins who draw crowds with their piano duets, or the unremarkable looking business woman who disfigures sexy girls so they can reach their full mental potential? It is also a pleasure to be privy to the kind of twisted sibling relationships that I used to think only John Irving could give us. Oly's narrative of her relationship with her adult daughter, Miranda's searching for her own ideas of normalcy--those scenes are incredibly poignant.

But honestly, it was as if Katherine Dunn suddenly couldn't handle all these folks and literally decided to kill them off so she could finish up the book--it wasn't quite a deus ex machina finish of the carnival, more like a Chicky (the telekinetic youngest child) ex machina who was darn close to a deus figure I guess.

What I am really mulling over though, is the subject of the title. The yearning for love that everybody has--all of these characters grapple with it, some successfully, some disasterously. That love is twisted into as many shapes as it possibly can be in this book, and we are left to puzzle it out.

I think this would be a great book for a book group--the fact that the reviews are so split is testimony to that (aren't the best groups when there's heated disagreement?). I'm not sure how valuable it would be in a classroom unless it's a class that deals with issues of disablility or maybe an English comp class. I would highly suggest it to all whose eyes skim across folks with deformaties and handicaps--the girl with splayed legs, the bank teller with two fingers--and isn't that most of us? Geek Love will, if nothing else, open your eyes to different ways of considering the body beautiful.

I am still wrestling with my feelings about this book. I loved the first half. Obviously the premise is disturbing and twisted but Dunn somehow managed to make it feel realistic and natural in context. She is an exceptional writer when she wants to be. The description of the Fabulon and the Binewski silbings' childhood is the highlight because it was wonderfully imaginative and it had heart.

I cannot pinpoint exactly where in the story my feelings about the book changed although it was somewhere after the halfway mark. I know when I realized it though. My boyfriend asked me a question while I was reading and I nearly bit his head off. I apologized and said, "This book is just such so toxic it is putting me in an awful mood."

Bascially the book lost its heart. The author kept piling on one cruel and disgusting event on top of another. It did not feel natural, it did not feel like it had a greater purpose it just felt very pushed. I couldn't shake the feeling that the author was more interested in demonstrating her daring and how far she was willing to go rather than writing a good story. Pushing the envelope can be great if it is done in a thought-provoking and carefully crafted manner. However, it is a fine line and if you go too far too often the shock value is gone, the goodwill is gone and you are just left with a huge pile of garbage. I think the book reached this point and it made me angry because after the first half of the book I had high expectations. Pain is a major theme through the book but any higher point Dunn was trying to make about the nature of pain the second half (if there was one) got lost in the muck.

Towards the end my bad feelings began to soften a bit. I don't know if it is because the author managed to bring back some of what made the first half of the book great or because the second half of the book desensitized me so much that I didn't care what happened to any of the characters any more.

I suppose I would recommend this book to people with strong stomachs only because very few books have caused such a strong reaction and internal struggle in me and that has got to be worth something. Plus I have never read anything like it before and there is definitely value in originality.

I'm going to admit that I actually had no idea what Geek Love was all about. I had heard the hype, and had a vague idea that it was chick lit for dot-commers. No interest. I was actually irritated when a friend gave the book to me as a gift.

Much to my bemusement, I discovered that Dunn was writing about literal geeks-- circus freaks-- live performers who made a living swallowing wild animals and bugs for an audience. That was much more interesting for me. I have had a long and lively interest in the culture of the circus and the role of freaks in the world.

Geek Love is very well written, in terms of general prose style. I found myself reading it compulsively. There is a lot of humor and warmth in the way that Dunn confounds our ideas of a loving approach to conception and child bearing. It can get pretty grotesque. It never, for me, crossed the line from grotesque into grotty. That kept it readable.

It wasn't a perfect novel. All the character traits and pyrotechnics nearly served to keep me from noticing that Dunn had trouble with the plot. The first half (two thirds?) are set up very well, but the story fizzled a bit in the last third. I had the feeling that she had painted herself into a corner and had to wind things up somehow so that we could get the resolution between Miranda and Olympia. There were several big shortcuts toward the end that I found disappointing-- particularly regarding Arty.

In any case, I enjoyed the book. I am likely to look out for more Dunn in the future. I liked what I read in the autobiographical afterward that was included in the 1990 edition. I would recommend Geek Love for someone who is looking for a pretty strange example of a feel-good novel. If you liked Geek Love, then I would actually recommend seeing if you could get a hold of a copy of Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others by Daniel P. Mannix. It should make an interesting counterpoint.

Geek Love is such an original work. It can't really compare it to anything else I have read. Others have outlined the outrageous story line here, so I don't feel the need to go into that. GL is one of the most challenging books I have ever read as far as just getting through it. I really had to struggle to complete it (and, honestly, I probably wouldn't have but my book club is reading it). The prose is brilliant, horrifying and hysterical. The down side? For me, I grew so accustomed to the gross-out freak factor that ultimately, I was pretty bored. I wanted more about Olympia and her pig-tailed daughter. I grew tired of the endless family drama scenes. Every book has to have its villain, right? But Arturo, the older controlling brother wore me out with his pseudo guru teachings. And Dunn really didn't have a good way of killing her characters off. There are many deaths in this book, but only one moved me (and I don't want to spoil anything for those intending to read it). I suppose that if one is into the most offbeat novel they can find then look no further. My fence-sitting on this book is because I can see how people could argue that this is a masterwork and how others could argue that it's a piece of trash. Both points are valid. But for me, ultimately, I was bored and wanting to get to something easier, more fun to read and more insightful than this offering gave me. And, I would not feel compelled to read any more from this author.