Also living in the house is Oly’s daughter Miranda, a beautiful young woman who has never known her mother. The novel exists in two worlds - the circus world of Oly’s youth, and the present day world of Portland, where the adult Oly has settled into a boarding house run by her mentally incapacitated mother, who is the victim of years of ingesting drugs, making her unable to recognize even her own daughter. She examines human nature and relationships from an alternative perspective, challenging perceptions of what love is and what is “normal”.

This foundation takes the novel into the realm of the surreal, but Dunn doesn’t seek to just startle or disgust viewers. Those children who fail to survive the traumatic pregnancies are preserved in jars for public viewing those who do survive are put to work in the circus. Olympia, or Oly, is one of four freak children born to Al and “Crystal Lil” Binewski, who run a traveling circus and create their own sideshow freaks by feeding Crystal Lil poisons, pills, insecticides, and radioisotopes during her pregnancies. Olympia’s freakish nature is not an aberration of nature so much as a carefully planned deviation. Katherine Dunn’s 1983 novel is the first-person story of Olympia Binewski, an albino, bald dwarf with a hunchback. It is gross, revolting, tragic, bizarre, shocking, and extraordinarily moving. If your tastes run more to the nature of Jane Austen or Robert Browning, Geek Love is not the novel for you. Despite its nomination for a National Book Award, this isn’t a book I recommend to just any lover of literature.

I fell in love with this warped tale of a dysfunctional family almost 20 years ago.

Upon starting the book, I immediately learned that the geeks of the title aren’t nerds, but circus freaks, aka “geeks”, and the love referred to in the title is more familial than romantic. When a friend recommended Geek Love to me, I imagined a tale of two nerds brought together through their passion for Star Trek and video games, a tale which reaffirmed that there truly was someone for everyone, even those souls lacking in beauty and social skills.

Geek love book review