Jun

18

Book ‘Em: The Circus Comes To Town.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 18, 2007 |

Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (Knopf, 1989), may be one of the best books about the circus ever written. Clearly taking some inspiration from Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, Dunn’s novel makes a family of circus freaks the sympathetic characters while it’s the “normal” people who seem weird. The story follows a family of circus freaks, bred purposely to save Binewski’s Fabulon, a traveling circus. Mother Crystal Lil ingests, or is injected with, toxic chemicals to produce special children, including Siamese twins and a boy with flippers instead of arms and legs. The narrator, Olympia, is a hunch-backed dwarf, not special enough to be a circus attraction, but she makes herself useful working as an assistant. After the circus collapses, destroyed by “aqua-boy” Arturo’s formation of a cult around himself, Olympia finds herself having to save the daughter she abandoned.

 

Tragic, complex, horrifying, Geek Love is not a book for the faint of heart, but it is an amazing piece of work. One can’t help wondering what Dunn ingested to produce such a strange and special child.


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