The narrative itself is imaginative and seamless the prose is brutally raw. There are no happy endings here: just a visceral, relentless look at life on the fringe for those "freaks" we objectify and slink away from in disgust and horror. There's beauty in the ugliness of it, and ugliness in the beauty of it.
It'll repel you and entice you, keep you riveted and make you squeamish, break your heart and give you hope, incite within you sympathy and sorrow. GEEK LOVE is at once disgusting and morbidly fascinating, bizarre and relentlessly real, repugnant and engrossing. In the pages of GEEK LOVE, nothing is off-limits: You'll meet geeks and freaks, a surgeon who joined the Fabulon after performing abdominal surgery on herself, a 26-pound newborn, hundreds of redheads, "The Bag Man," a reporter-turned-maggot-salesman, an heir to a travel-dinner fortune who has a very interesting way of helping people, and more. The novel follows two storylines: the one during Oly's childhood and adolescence with the carnival and a present-day storyline in which Oly lives in the same building as her beautiful daughter, an artist who has no idea that the grotesque hunchback she's so desperate to draw is her mother. With Chick's help, she becomes pregnant with Arty's child-a daughter, Miranda, who is completely normal but for a curling little tail. Olympia, for her part, is desperately in love with Arty, and she's content to be his slave, to fulfill his every wish. He calls his followers "The Arturans," and he preaches salvation through the sacrifice of body parts. He's so magnetic, in fact, that he establishes his own cult. He thinks only of self-preservation, and, as a result, he can be undeniably charismatic. Arty is power-hungry, malicious, bitter, calculating, jaggedly jealous. But it's Oly's brother, Arty, who's really at the center of the story. Olympia is our narrator, guiding us through the freaky and fantastical world of GEEK LOVE.
Lily intentionally uses illegal drugs, insecticides, and even radioisotopes during her pregnancies, and after several failed attempts (which are on display in the carnival's museum, floating in formaldehyde, their deformities revealed in all their grotesque glory), she has four successes: Arturo (aka "The Aqua Boy"), a head and torso with flippers instead of arms and legs Iphigenia and Electra, beautiful twins who share a common set of legs Olympia, a bald, hunch-backed albino dwarf and the youngest, Chick, who looks like a "norm" on the outside but has telekinetic powers that are both opportune and catastrophic for the Binewski family. In the early days of the carnival, there isn't a lot of money to pay carnival performers so Al and Lily decide to breed their own freak show. GEEK LOVE is the story of Binewski's Fabulon, a traveling carnival owned and operated by Al and Lily Binewski.
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