She didn’t know she was sick with lung cancer yet. (She was good at that, a curious and engaged listener between 19, she even answered reader questions on any subject for Willamette Week, her local alt weekly.) I last saw her two months before she died. We became friends and pen pals, of a sort. In the nearly two decades since “Geek Love,” she had shown the world no new fiction - though she had published lots of great nonfiction, much of it about boxing. I met Dunn while I was working at The Paris Review, after writing her a frank fan letter, asking for something we could publish. “And I once gave a reading in a small bookstore,” she said, “where the audience was primarily young people in black leather with spikes through their noses and big green mohawks, and they thought that the book was about the vanity of conventional notions of beauty.” A parenting magazine took it as an attack on bad parenting. She told me about a review in a disability publication that said “Geek Love” was either an enormous joke at the expense of the disabled or the best thing for disability rights to come down the pike in a long time. (The first print run was 20,000 copies in total, it has sold nearly half a million.) Dunn would describe how charmed she was by the variety of reader interpretations. She was surprised by the powerful, continuous response it received. “I wrote most of that book in the water,” she once told me. She swam a mile a day, five days a week, at a pool in the basement of a school near her apartment. At the time, she worked as a waitress, a bartender and a house painter. Terry Gilliam was a fan, as were Harlan Ellison, Kurt Cobain, Flea, Karen Russell, Lana Wachowski.ĭunn didn’t much care what was popular or critically acclaimed when she was writing “Geek Love” in the 1980s. The book connected with readers of all kinds, but especially self-identified freaks, people who felt misunderstood, college students, artists.

The narrator, Olympia, was the albino dwarf, but she felt like my mirror: a put-upon observer of her own family, a peacemaker, a weirdo.

I was that kind of reader, awakened by the novel at 16. Yet somehow this strange, singular book has spent the 27 years since its publication doing just that, speaking clear and true to a certain kind of reader. It hardly sounds like a universal cipher, the kind of humanist tale that attracts readers over time. Lil births a boy with flippers, beautiful Siamese-twin sisters joined at the waist, an albino dwarf hunchback and a boy with telekinetic powers. Carnival proprietors taking drugs and poisons to intentionally breed baby freaks: That’s the unvarnished core of Katherine Dunn’s third novel, 1989’s “Geek Love.” The Binewski Carnival Fabulon needs a boost, and Aloysius and Crystal Lil Binewski hatch this twisted plan to turn things around.

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