She had a stout voice and a clear insight.” Then there’s Jim Rose, who read Geek Love when he was a 30-year-old American touring Europe as a stunt performer with his wife’s family circus. No book I've read, before or since, has given me that specific jolt.” Harlan Ellison describes Geek Love as “transformative” and adds: “Not only for its time and its subject matter, but for Katherine Dunn’s attack on the material. I stood there in the bookstore and my jaw came unhinged. She picked it up expecting a story of nerds in love, but found something else: “I felt electrocuted when I read that first page with Crystal Lil and her freak brood. Novelist Karen Russell read Geek Love for the first time when she was 15. The book has inspired and moved writers, artists, and performers to tell their own wild stories. But Geek Love has been a perennial best seller, and its cultural influence has been prodigious. It hardly sounds like mass-market material. The Binewskis become freak superheroes, a team of way-weirdos, each with his own skills and powers. It works: Lil gives birth to a boy with flippers for hands and feet, a set of Siamese twins joined at the waist, a hunchback albino dwarf, and a regular-looking baby with telekinetic powers. Their methods are experimental and more than a little disturbing: They mess with their own DNA and biochemistry using various drugs, insecticides, and radioactive materials. (The titular “geek” refers to a sideshow performer who bites the heads off chickens.) When some of the show’s performers defect, its proprietors-Aloysius and Crystal Lil Binewski-decide to breed their own stable of freaks.
It’s the tale of a circus sideshow called the Binewski Carnival Fabulon that hits hard times. The book is Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, a dazzling oddball masterpiece published 25 years ago this month. They make you feel like you’re being let in on this secret. “Certain books,” he says, “are so imaginative that they suck you into a world that you’d never known existed.
Flea, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist, adores it. It made me ashamed to be so utterly normal.” In the ’90s, Harry Anderson, the magician and actor (he played the Judge on Night Court) optioned the film rights and wrote a movie script himself. Terry Gilliam-former Monty Pythonite and the director of Time Bandits, Brazil, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-calls it “the most romantic novel about love and family I have read. Geek Love has inspired a sprawling universe of fan art, including this oil and watercolor by Brandon Zimmerman that depicts the novel's conjoined twins, Electra and Iphigenia Binewski.
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