"Hey, nit squat! These are written by norms to scare norms. And do you know what the monsters and demons and rancid spirits are? Us, that's what. You and me. We are the things that come to the norms in the nightmares. The thing that lurks in the bell tower and bites out the throats of the choirboys--that's you, Oly. And the thing in the closet that makes the babies scream in the dark before it sucks their last breath--that's me. And the rustling in the brush and the strange piping cries that chill the spine on a deserted road at twilight--that's the twins singing practice scales while they look for berries."
Olympia Binewski comes from a family of sideshow geeks. Her mother, Crystal Lil, bites the heads of chickens; her father Al is the ringmaster. By "experimenting with illicit and prescription drugs, insecticides, and eventually radioisotopes," they produce a brood of children with sideshow-ready deformities. There's Arturo, the Aqua Boy, with flippers for hands and legs, and the conjoined twins Electra and Iphigenia. Olympia, the narrator, is an albino with a hump. The youngest child, Chick, surpasses even these: although he looks like a "norm," he's got telekinetic powers. Together, they cross the country as the Binewski Family Fabulon.
One thing I like about Geek Love is this: it understands both the appeal and the danger of being unlike everyone else. The Binewskis are proud of their strangeness, and pity the norms who come to gawk at them before returning to their painfully normal lives. But that pride comes at a heavy cost; just ask the dozens of children who didn't make it, who were stillborn or died because of the effect of Al and Lil's experiments, and who are now collected in glass jars. The central plot of the novel centers on Arty, a megalomaniac who uses his charisma to turn his sideshow act into a following, then a cult, demanding that his followers slowly chop off their fingers an toes, then their limbs, to become more like him. Normal life is painful, Arty contends; if you want to be happy, you've got to be a freak. I don't think it's a coincidence that these days you see that same kind of language--"normies"--on the most toxic, Pepe-loving internet cesspools. The compulsive rejection of normal life can become its own kind of horrible groupthink, as Arty proves. His magnetic personality overwhelms not just his thousands of followers, but his family, too; he forces Olympia and Chick and one of the twins (Iphy) to do his bidding.
But a lot of it I didn't like. Geek Love is overstuffed and overwritten, and loaded with mixed metaphors ("'Truth' was Elly's favorite set of brass knuckles, but she didn't necessarily know the whole elephant"). That might be all right, considering that the baroque language reflects the ornate weirdness of the Binewskis and the grotesque silliness of the plot. But I think Dunn makes a mistake choosing to write in the voice of an older, wiser Olympia. That helps make sense of the secondary "present" narrative, in which the older Olympia saves her beautiful daughter from being disfigured by a woman who believes (in the spirit of Arturism) that disfiguring beautiful women helps unleash their potential. But it gives too much authorial distance in the main narrative, and makes it difficult to understand why exactly Olympia, and everyone else, is in Arty's thrall so much. It's a given that Arty is nasty, self-serving, and has delusions of grandeur, and Oly's insistence that she would do anything for him isn't sufficiently grounded. A more immediate voice might have helped me make sense of, for instance, Olympia's choice to use her telekinetic brother to lift Arty's sperm out of his balls and impregnate her.
Yeah, that's the other thing. I thought the book was mostly pretty unpleasant. It's the twins who get the worst of it: Arty, incensed at their nascent experimenting with sex, "gives them" to a horribly disfigured follower who impregnates them, then lobotomizes the more rebellious of the two so that she won't go through with her plan to abort the child. That image--the remaining twin carrying her child in one arm and propping up her lobotomized sister in the other--really is the stuff of nightmares. Arty gets his comeuppance, but the twins are carried off with it, too, and the pointless cruelty of this torture never seems to be assuaged or redeemed. It feels to me like the twins are sacrificed for sensationalism. In a book about deformity, that struck me as the ugliest thing.
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