By Melanie Shugert
Katherine Dunn is an award-winning boxing journalist whose work has appeared in many publications, including Esquire, KO Magazine, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The Ring. She also has written three novels, including Geek Love, about a family of freaks in a circus. The parents, Al and Crystal Lil, made sure that when mom was pregnant she took an excessive amount of drugs, which led to their children being genetically altered. But the situation really isn’t as strange as that might sound.
Geek Love reassures us that everyone is a freak, and no one is anywhere near perfect. Of course, some freaks are freakier than others. Dunn shows this with the family dynamic, the crazy situations, and the characters’ personalities. Rather than gawking at these characters, as we might at the weirdest end of the spectrum on YouTube, Dunn makes us care about them in a shockingly revealing, extraordinarily written work.
Dunn puts a different twist on genetic mutation by showing us a family that is happy being freaks, and in fact looks down on “norms.” The author’s descriptions and voice jump out from the page. “Even the wrist joints of his flippers seemed strong,” she writes of one of the freaks. “Where the three long toes of his hip fins bent to clutch the bed spread, I saw a curling fuzz of hair clouding the top of each knuckle.”
Dunn focuses on a family dynamic that is, like the rest of the book, different from expectations. You might assume that a story about freaks would find them sticking together because they don’t have anyone else like them. But the author decided to put another spin on things: Arty, the power-hungry boy with fins, wants nothing except to be the main attraction of the circus, and he manipulates his family until he gets his way. He outsmarted his father so he could manage the circus, but it seemed too easy. “You know, Oly, I’m surprised. I didn’t think Papa would be so easy to beat,” he said. “Not this soon. It’s kind of scary.”
Arty is a complex character because, even though he likes to act tough, he does show remorse for some of his actions, and he resents the actions of others that hurt him. For example, “He would never ask for my arms around him but times like this he would allow me to warm him, to warm myself against him,” Dunn writes. “I nuzzled into the back of his neck, breathing carefully so as not to irritate him. I felt his fin stroking my arm.”
The novel also includes the beautiful Siamese twins, Ely and Iphy, each of whom has a different personality. This makes their interactions comical because they’re always at odds, and it adds an intensity to their fights. “They were fighting and their door was locked,” Dunn writes. “The thumping woke me up. I burst out of my cupboard thinking of elephants and earthquakes.”
The main character, Oly, is an albino dwarf with a hump and no hair. She always tries to protect the ones she loves, although she has a funny way of showing it. Her older brother, Arty, is her idol and she frantically tries to please him at any cost. “He saw no use for you and you interfered with his use of me. I sent you away to please him, to prove my dedication to him, and to prevent him from killing you,” Dunn writes in a passage that finds Oly telling her daughter why Arty didn’t want her around anymore and why she was sent away.
Finally, the youngest child, Chick, is an outcast because he’s normal on the outside but can use telekinesis. “We heard the ping of hairpins hitting the window, the floor, the wall, and Mama’s gasp and muffled shriek as she lifted off the floor and floated, lying on the air while her thick-strapped brassiere stretched awat from her with an ugly ripping sound…,” Dunn writes. In this scene Chick is just a baby and is about to be sent away but he’s hungry and wants to nurse to he uses force to get his way through telekinesis.
As in the world of norms, some freaks are willing to do anything to get to the top. Arty had one of the twins, Ely, become the subject of experiments by Chick, which caused her to become a vacant vessel hauled around by her sister Iphy. Ely made sure the twins’ virginity was taken to ruin her sister and Arty’s relationship. There is hardly any love and anything is possible.
Dunn creates her own rules in this book and with it, an entirely new society. Or is it really? The author may be showing us a grotesque alternate universe, or she may be holding out own up to a funhouse mirror. Either, Geek Love is riveting.