www.strangewords.com/archive/geek.html

Katherine Dunn�s Geek Love (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1983) is the saga of Binewski�s Fabulon, a traveling carnival, the star attractions of which are the Binewski children themselves. All are products of an ambitious breeding program devised by father Aloysius to reverse the Fabulon�s fall onto hard times. Determined to create special children, wife Crystal Lil ingests pharmaceuticals, insecticides, radioisotopes, and any other potentially mutagenic substances Al can procure. After all, Lil remarks, "What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?". Flipper-limbed Arturo, siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia, Chick the wonder, and albino dwarf Olympia are living testaments to the program�s success and contributors to the Fabulon�s continued existence, as are the many less successful experiments displayed in glass jars in the Fabulon�s Hall of Horrors.

Binewski family life is fully as bizarre as the family physiques. Bell jarred by existence on the road, socialized by the carnies who staff the midway, the children grow up unfettered by common conventions. Sibling rivalry is a take-no-prisoners guerrilla competition measured in daily box office receipts. Arturo, especially fierce in battle, devotes himself to improving the draw of his act and eventually hits on the ultimate device - he becomes a church. "What Arty wanted the crowds to hear was that they were all hormone-driven insects and probably deserved to be miserable but that he, the Aqua Boy, could really feel for them because he was in much better shape," relates narrator Olympia. "That�s what it sounded like to me, but the customers must have been hearing something different because they gobbled it up and seemed to enjoy feeling sorry for themselves." In trickles that become torrents, the marks ante up their worldly goods, join the Admitted, and begin the process of Shedding. Inch by inch, finger by toe, initiates practice a horror show of sympathetic magic, emulating Arturo in body (nubs and torso) so as to attain his perceived exalted state in mind and spirit. Arty�s growing ascendancy over following, Fabulon, and family, is accompanied by crescendoing cruel and amoral behavior. Inevitably events spiral to extremes dictated by Binewski family dynamics and internal logical, and Arturo and those around him reap the aphoristic just rewards of his absolute power.

Katherine Dunn presents the bizarre and twisted saga of the Fabulon, Arturism, and the nuke family Binewski as a series of flashbacks set within an older Olympia�s struggle to protect her daughter from an independent apostle of Arturo�s cult. Miss Lick�s vocation is liberating young women from the beauty that enslaves them to men, thereby providing them with the asexual, distraction-free existence that she feels she herself enjoys. "If all these pretty women could shed the traits that made men want them (their prettiness) then they would no longer depend on their own exploitability but would use their talents and intelligence to become powerful," she explains to Olympia. Money in exchange for the Shedding of beauty is what Miss Lick offers. Her personal satisfaction derives from her subjects� testimonies that the disfigurement is the best thing that ever happened to them � that, plus watching the scarifications. When Olympia�s daughter, raised as an orphan in ignorance of her Fabulon heritage, accepts Miss Lick�s initial offer to remove her lone Binewski "specialness", Olympia devotes herself to curtailing Miss Lick�s attentions, no matter the cost.

In Geek Love Katherine Dunn builds a hall of mirrors bridge from far beyond the edges of a reader�s most bizarre and terrifying nightmare to territory within most cognitive maps to the backyards of our own psyches. Where Arturo affects the destiny of hundreds, Miss Lick works on the scale of individuals. Where Arturo plays like harp strings the highest and basest emotions of his followers, Miss Lick plucks only at the chord of superficial greed. Where Arturo openly pursues omnipotent dominance and power, Miss Lick claims altruism as her motive. Arturo is malice and malignity on epic proportions, so remote from common experience that it is almost too excessive to horrify. Miss Lick fully embodies Arturo�s monstrous extremes in her manipulations and mutilations, but on a human scale. Arturo and Miss Lick are like one Janus-faced character, but where Arturo is genocide, Miss Lick is serial killing, the horror that could be next door. Geek Love has a message more immediate even than this, though, and does not rest with installing the monstrous in the neighborhood. In its final scenes Katherine Dunn delivers the coup de grace, bringing monstrosity and horror home to rest within the potential of us all.

Katherine Dunn�s Geek Love is a chilling, hallucinogenic study of the horror side of human behavior. And that is merely one facet of this complex text. Dunn also considers childhood, family, body-image, self-image, love, sex, power, and more, all infused with her deeply disturbing, Fellini-on-acid vision. While neither easy nor comfortable reading, Geek Love is truly unique. Strange Words guarantees Katherine Dunn�s Geek Love is a book you won�t soon forget.