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Geek love
400 pages
A fiercely original, grotesque family saga that forces you to find the tender, beating heart inside the truly monstrous.
What it feels like
Reading this book is a visceral, deeply unsettling experience that wraps you in the claustrophobic, sulfurous atmosphere of a traveling carnival. It moves with a steady, hypnotic pull, drawing you into a world where the grotesque is revered and normalcy is the ultimate failure. The prose is lush, sensory, and unapologetically macabre, painting a portrait of a family bound by toxic devotion, megalomania, and fierce, twisted love. You will feel a constant push-and-pull of revulsion and profound empathy as the narrative explores the darkest corners of sibling rivalry and bodily autonomy. It is a masterpiece of transgressive fiction, designed to delight readers who crave the bizarre, the dark, and the beautifully deformed, leaving a permanent, brilliant scar on your psyche.
- Mood
- carnivalesque
- unsettling
- claustrophobic
- sulfurous
- Tone
- macabre
- cynical
- tender
- unapologetic
- darkly comedic
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the illusion of normalcy · toxic family dynamics · beauty in the grotesque · cults of personality · bodily autonomy
- The writing
- Visceral, lushly grotesque, and unapologetically sensory, blending carnival barker bombast with startlingly poetic observations.
- The arc
- Moves from morbid, wide-eyed fascination into a tragic, horrifying, yet strangely poignant culmination of family destruction.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave the weird, the dark, and the transgressive, and who aren't afraid to empathize with deeply dysfunctional, monstrous characters.
Content notes
- body horror
- child abuse
- incest
- drug use
- self-mutilation
- graphic violence
About the book
Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan... Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins... albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset.
As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.
Description from Open Library.
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