Moderato. Lightly strummed guitar. Two backup singers who constantly refrain 
 Sweet sweet, the freaks that you gave to me 
 You can't beat the geeks that you gave to me 
 A handsome tuxedo-wearing guy sings 
 Take one set of Siamese twins 
 Add a boy with only fins 
 No legs, no arms, he swims, he charms 
 Memories are made of this 
 Then add some pesticide 
 Just a sprinkle of infanticide 
 Incest and twin sex for the flavor 
 Should you be hard to please 
 Voluntary amputees 
 Will give you plenty to savor 
 Add a dwarfish hunchbacked girl 
 And a guy without a face 
 There's a telekinetic boy 
 And a rich lady who likes to pay pretty girls to undergo operations to make them really ugly 
 Memories are made of this 
 Sweet sweet, the freaks that you gave to me 
 Memories are made of this 
 You can't beat the geeks that you gave to me 
 Fade. 
 * 
 The story is narrated by Oly, the hunchbacked albino dwarf. She says : 
 I realized that the peculiar look on people's faces when they saw me was not envy or hatred, but could be translated into one simple question : "What the hell happened to you?" They needed to know so they could prevent it from happening to them. 
 My answer was simple, too : "My father and mother designed me this way. They achieved greater originality in some of their other projects." 
 So, if you read the blurb you will know that this is the story of a family of freaks who run a freak show in their own carnival, which constantly tours the small towns of the South and Midwest. And it's a beloved cult novel, which I had only vaguely heard of until recently. It was one of those "why haven't I already read this?" moments. And now I have. Phew, it felt really long, and at the end, I couldn't wait to be done with it. It's uneasy reading when you utterly despise the sniveling wretched narrator in whose brain you live throughout. And also you find the author likes to describe the simplest things in oblique prose. And also the most complicated things in oblique prose. And also I felt jerked around more than somewhat. I will explain. 
 This novel is has a couple of Real Big Themes. Like in Uncle Tom's Cabin, the theme is slavery. Or in the novels of Martin Amis the theme is Martin Amis' fabulous intelligence. Here it's kind of two intertwined ideas. 
 Arty the Aqua Boy : 
 We have this advantage, that the norms expect us to be wise. Even a rat's-ass dwarf jester got credit for terrible canniness disguised as tomfoolery. Freaks are like owls, mythed into blinking, bloodless objectivity. The norms figure our contact with their brand of life is shaky. They see us as cut off from temptation and pettiness. Even our hate is grand by their feeble lights. And the more deformed we are, the higher our supposed sanctity. 
 So Arty gradually starts a cult. The hicks who patronize the freak show begin to see him as a guru. He preaches a message of P.I.P. : Peace, Isolation, Purity. The idea is for people to be like Arty in order to achieve this. 
 The Arturans therefore snip off increasing bits of themselves to denormalise, starting with toes and fingers - because the normal world is so overburdened with expectations (get a good job, have great sex, go on fabulous holidays, you know) you can never find P I P there, so you have to make a radical incremental voluntary rejection of it. Snip snip snip. (Similarly in the great movie City of Lost Children the cult of self-blinded people preach that rejecting diurnal sight liberates the mind to spiritual sight.) 
 The carnival acquires a very conveniently unethical surgeon who travels with them and performs the amputations. And it was characters like this doctor who, alas, rang too hollow for me - bong bong, the telling sound of a character made up by the author because she had to make that part of the story work, and to hell with any considerations like plausibility. 
 Plausibility in a story about generically damaged freaks in a freak show which includes a boy with seemingly infinite telekinetic powers? Sure! We ask for believability in a science fiction story set on the Planet Glurg amongs the alien Glurgians just as much as we do in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. 
 So increasingly I couldn't quite buy a lot of the motivations on display here, even given the abnormal psychologies of some of them. A great deal of what goes on in this book, and a lot goes on, seemed to be series of contrivances towards another ratchetting up of delicious grotesqueness. The Bag Man! The maggot factory from human parts! Let's have the hunchbacked dwarf do a striptease! The freaks are humanized and dehumanized co-terminously. This author has her cake and eats it. 
 Anyhow, the cult of Arty, takes up the majority of the story. But there's also the other part which involves the millionaire Miss Lick who likes to film pretty girls undergoing disfiguring operations. Yes. This is another Big Theme. This is also about liberation. Arty wants to liberate you from normality, and Miss Lick wants to liberate women from male attention. This then allows them to become molecular pharmacologists or top UN interpreters. 
 These two stories drag the book like a supermarket trolley with wonky wheels towards metaphor and polemic and away from the living breathing world which us readers want from fiction. Fiction has to be true. In Geek Love too many of the characters Stand for Something, like Mrs Do As You Would Be Done By and Mrs Be Done By As You Did in The Water Babies (1863). 
 I must say that most readers of Geek Love completely disagree with this, they have no problem with these characters and they love the world Katherine Dunn creates. But they can go and write their own review, and many have. 
 I read that people have been optioning this book for a movie since it came out and I'm surprised it hasn't been done. Common decency may have prevented it from being filmed before now, I guess, but now we live in a world of The Human Caterpillar and suchlike, so that's no barrier at all. And CGI makes the rest of it a stroll in the park. I say do it now, and Ellie and Dakota Fanning are shoo-ins for the parts of the Siamese twins. 
 2.5 stars because it's some kind of achievement, I guess