

- Fiction, Carnival owners, Monsters, Family
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.
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Character
Bleak, overwhelming, grave and open-ended.
- warmbleak
- cooloverwhelming
- gravecomic
- resolvedopen-ended
- effortlessdemanding
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About the book
- Author
- Katherine Dunn
- First published
- 1989
- Pages
- 355
- Publisher
- Knopf, Vintage Books, Random House Trade
- Editions
- 9
- Language
- English
- ISBN
- 9780241126271
Where to read
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On Open Library, 9 have read it and 131 want to.
“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.”
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