Geek Love - Katherine Dunn

At once a highly regarded novel and an enduring cult classic, Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carnival family of human oddities. As Dunn charts their journey across the U.S. backwaters, their Machiavellian rivalries, and their galvanic effect on gawking crowds, she takes on everything from definitions of beauty to organized religion to family values. \nNational Book Award finalist \nHere is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family's most precious--and dangerous--asset. \n \n As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.\n