By Lisa Fary
I finished reading Geek Love on the plane back from my Philadelphia apartment hunt. When I got home, I found it kept creeping back into my head and I couldn’t pick up another fiction book for a while. Author Katherine Dunn wiped me out.
Part family saga, part Southern Gothic, and part freakshow, Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis – a carnival family that will not make you want to run away and join the circus.
Parents Al and Crystal Lil are just like most American parents: they want their kids to have good lives and do everything they can to ensure that. However, while most parents would start a college fund or look into Montessori schools, Al and Crystal Lil “design” their kids to be freaks via pre-natal drug and chemical experiments. The children who survived birth are Arturo (who has flippers instead of arms and legs), Electra and Iphigenia (Siamese twins who share a single set of legs), Olympia (albino, humpback dwarf with alopecia), and Fortunato (who looks normal, but has a hidden ability).
The family is not what the average norm will expect. The Binewski children don’t lead charmingly eccentric carnie lives that would lend themselves to a charmingly eccentric movie or TV show. They also don’t fulfill that “ugly on the outside, beautiful on the inside” stereotype. Freaks on the outside, they’re all freaks on the inside, too.
Geek Love is told in two different narratives, both from the point of view of Olympia. One is her story of growing up with her siblings in the family business, The Binewski Carnival Fabulon. The other is Oly’s story as an adult aged thirty-eight, secretly looking out for her mother and her daughter, who have no idea of the dwarf’s true identity due to blindness and growing up in a convent, respectively. In both narratives, Oly deals with a larger than life, sociopathic personality; however, she’s docile with one and proactive with the other.
Dunn’s novel shows sibling rivalry at its worst, parental love at its most bizarre and stirring, and human nature at its ugliest. Geek Love is horrifying and brilliant and I couldn’t put it down.
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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
