Literacy Source

Geek Love is not like anything I've read before.  When Art and Lil Binewski make the decision to start a family, they take the needs of their business, a traveling carnival, into account.   During her pregnancies, Lil ingests a variety of drugs and poisons to ensure that she will give birth to sideshow freaks.  The resulting five children are Arty, who has flippers in place of limbs, Elly and Iphy, conjoined twins and classical pianists, Olympia, a bald albino hunchback dwarf, and Chick, who appears normal but has telekinetic powers.   Olympia Binewski narrates her family's bizarre story.  Arty, narcissistic and domineering, starts a dangerous cult of followers who elect to have their limbs removed.   Elly and Iphy make side money off of the men that find them alluring.  Olympia's complete devotion to Arty prompts her to convince Chick to use his telekinetic abilities to impregnate her with Arty's child.   The resulting child, Miranda, is born normal save for a small tail; but the tail is not freakish enough for the carnival, and Olympia is forced to have Miranda raised in a convent.  

It would have been easy for Dunn to rely heavily on the pure strangeness of her story to keep the momentum going.   But the characters are so vibrant, so raw, so completely and genuinely human, that Geek Love is not just a freak show in itself, but a masterpiece of the human condition.