🎃 What I Am Reading for Halloween: "Geek Love" by Katherine Dunn

I've had this book lying around for years, and even after I was spurred to add it to my Halloween pile I was never sure if it was a horror novel. I am not sure that that is the first way I'd describe it: I'd say instead that it is a novel of the grotesque. Everything in the novel is purposefully grotesque - the characters, the setting (despite being in the normal world), the food, the sex, everything. 90% of the descriptions in the book aim to disgust.

This is how it is supposed to be, though. The book is another tale of that proud, indispensable slice of Americana: the traveling carnival and freak show, in the tradition of Freaks, Lobster Boy, some HBO cult classic I had not heard of previously called “Carnivàle,” and other media that I have never actually consumed. The carnival is one of those institutions that appears so often in popular culture that it is hard sometimes to remember that such things actually existed. But exist they did, and I have to assume that they have launched a thousand horrified-but-tittilated American Studies theses.

The story is that of the Binewski family, the owners of said traveling carnival. The parents, Lil and Al, get the idea to breed their own freak show family, through the use of radioactive elements and other poisons ingested during pregnancy. Thus, they give birth to Arturo, the Aqua Man (a boy with flippers, but no limbs); Electra and Iphigenia, Siamese twins; Olympia, an albino hunchbacked dwarf, the novel's narrator; and Chick, who is telekinetic. The main part of the story chronicles their lives as the scheming Arturo moves to assert dominance over the circus, and eventually comes to form his own cult of whatever the opposite of transhumanism is. The Binewskis are convinced that they are superior to the "norms" whom they entertain, and Arturo improvises a philosophy whereby anyone can improve their lives and be free of the world if they have their body parts progressively amputated down to being only a torso and head (as he is). They achieve "Peace, Isolation, and Purity" (PIP) in Arty's under-baked cosmology. Things spiral.

Meanwhile, in the framing narrative, dispersed in chapters through the novel, Olympia lives her life after it all goes wrong. She spends her time in hiding, looking after her child who was born a beautiful young woman with a small tail. She works to save her from the altruism of a tycoon who believes that beautiful women have to purposefully give up their beauty (by becoming disfigured) in order to get men out of their hair and reach their full intellectual potential.

The book is straight-faced body horror with, as you can imagine, a lot to say about physical forms, and the assumptions that we make about the disabled (though I wouldn’t at all describe the book as particularly political). There is not a single member of the family who does not feel superior to "norms,” and the passing-as-normal Chick feels inferior to his siblings, despite his eventual usefulness to Arty's rinky-dink cult. In the contemporary narrative, Olympia's new friend (the same one who wants to rescue women from the tyranny and tragedy of sexual attractiveness) assumes that Olympia needs to be sheltered from stares and mockery; whereas she is used to, perhaps even covets, this attention, from her life as a carny. In both narratives, the disabled or disfigured are superior. They don’t have a sense of being excluded, and not just by virtue of having developed a thick skin. The novel, despite the discomfort it aims to induce, tells a story where failures happen for only universal, human reasons and not for reasons of lack of ability; though some danger does arise due to prejudice.

The traveling circus is a liminal entity, always in motion between one location and the next. The locations themselves are usually in society's hinterlands, where such cheap entertainment is welcomed, perhaps in the absence of any compelling competition. This life at the margins allows such freak shows, literal and figurative, to survive and thrive, ordering their lives (as Arty does in his own sinister way) as they see fit. Meanwhile, Olympia’s friend the tycoon is also exempt from the rules of society, as she is rich and influential enough to pursue her counter-beautification project. The women that she makes ugly, however, do have a place in society, one that she thinks that they would not have achieved without her intervention. Everyone wants to re-invent themselves, out of aspiration or hopelessness, but it happens away from the eyes of the great middle part of the social bell curve. “Norm” outsiders, inferior, can only watch the show.