Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

ACCLAIM FOR KATHERINE DUNNS
Geek Love

Dunn has a forceful, sulfuric, lurid imagination. A tale-spinning machine [that] we are unlikely, ever, to forget.

The Washington Post

Probably one of the most extraordinary American novels of this decade. A fantasy as opulently grotesque and alive as Gunter Grasss The Tin Drum. Like any great work of art, Geek Love creates its own rules and fleshes them into an unforgettable world.

The Seattle Times

A testament to that which is quintessentially human. Throughout, Dunns fiercely unconventional lyricism graces the horror and unfamiliarity of her creation. [It] translates not only into a fullness of language but into a richness of philosophy and humor as well.

The Plain Dealer

Katherine Dunn has pulled out and ground to dust all her imaginative stops.

The Boston Globe

A picture of family life as dark as a midway at 4 a.m. An exciting, sometimes repugnant, often blackly humorous reunion of Lenny Bruce and George Grosz.

San Francisco Chronicle

Dozens of peculiar characters, complicated passions and antipathies, buckets of jokes, a hugely imagined world that often seems to be propelled forward like a boulder rolling down a hill. Americas sentimental attachment to geeks is the dark side of its sentimental attachment to Mom and apple pie. That geekinessthe comic exploration of the peculiar as an end in itselfis what gives Geek Love its main success: that and Ms. Dunns tremendous imagination.

The New York Times Book Review

A fascinating and shocking novel that is difficult to turn away from.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sweeps the reader up through the power of her remarkable prose, a potent combination of sensuous, evocative descriptions and bluntly vernacular dialogue. The story is strong and the characters absorbing.

Chicago Sun-Times

Provocative, inventive, funny, grisly and hugely compelling. Geek Love is a cruel joke turned into a sensitive novel, but a sensitive novel played for laughs.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

A work of great bravado.

Providence Journal

KATHERINE DUNN
Geek Love

Katherine Dunn lives and works in Oregon. Geek Love is her third novel and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize.

ALSO BY KATHERINE DUNN

Attic

Truck

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JUNE 2002

Copyright 1983, 1988, 1989 by Katherine Dunn

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1989.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work were originally published in the Mississippi Mud
Book of Days and the Looking Glass Bookstore Review.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Dunn, Katherine.
Geek love / Katherine Dunn.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79448-2
I. Title.
PS3554.U47G4 1989
81354dc 19 88-45776

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

FOR

Eli Malachy Dunn Dapolonia

This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.

Prospero, The Tempest 5.1.275-6

W hen your mama was the geek, my dreamlets, Papa would say, she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. Spread your lips, sweet Lil, theyd cluck, and show us your choppers!

This same Crystal Lil, our star-haired mama, sitting snug on the built-in sofa that was Artys bed at night, would chuckle at the sewing in her lap and shake her head. Dont piffle to the children, Al. Those hens ran like whiteheads.

Nights on the road this would be, between shows and towns in some campground or pull-off, with the other vans and trucks and trailers of Binewskis Carnival Fabulon ranged up around us, safe in our portable village.

After supper, sitting with full bellies in the lamp glow, we Binewskis were supposed to read and study. But if it rained the story mood would sneak up on Papa. The hiss and tick on the metal of our big living van distracted him from his papers. Rain on a show night was catastrophe. Rain on the road meant talk, which, for Papa, was pure pleasure.

Its a shame and a pity, Lil, hed say, that these offspring of yours should only know the slumming summer geeks from Yale.

Princeton, dear, Mama would correct him mildly. Randall will be a sophomore this fall. I believe hes our first Princeton boy.

We children would sense our story slipping away to trivia. Arty would nudge me and Id pipe up with, Tell about the time when Mama was the geek! and Arty and Elly and Iphy and Chick would all slide into line with me on the floor between Papas chair and Mama.

Mama would pretend to be fascinated by her sewing and Papa would tweak his swooping mustache and vibrate his tangled eyebrows, pretending reluctance. Welllll hed begin, it was a long time ago

Before we were born!

Before hed proclaim, waving an arm in his grandest ringmaster style, before I even dreamed you, my dreamlets!

I was still Lillian Hinchcliff in those days, mused Mama. And when your father spoke to me, which was seldom and reluctantly, he called me Miss.

Miss! we would giggle. Papa would whisper to us loudly, as though Mama couldnt hear, Terrified! I was so smitten Id stutter when I tried to talk to her. M-M-M-Miss Id say.

Wed giggle helplessly at the idea of Papa, the GREAT TALKER , so flummoxed.

I, of course, addressed your father as Mister Binewski.

There I was, said Papa, hosing the old chicken blood and feathers out of the geek pit on the morning of July 3rd and congratulating myself for having good geek posters, telling myself I was going to sell tickets by the bale because the weekend of the Fourth is the hottest time for geeks and I had a fine, brawny geek that year. Enthusiastic about the work, he was. So Im hosing away, feeling very comfortable and proud of myself, when up trips your mama, looking like angelfood, and tells me my geek has done a flit in the night, folded his rags as you might say, and hailed a taxi for the airport. He leaves a note claiming his pop is very sick and he, the geek, must retire from the pit and take his fangs home to Philadelphia to run the family bank.

Brokerage, dear, corrects Mama.

And with your mama, Miss Hinchcliff, standing there like three scoops of vanilla I cant even cuss! What am I gonna do? The geek posters are all over town!

It was during a war, darlings, explains Mama. I forget which one precisely. Your father had difficulty getting help at that time or he never would have hired me, even to make costumes, as inexperienced as I was.