Sample Fiction:
Geek Love By Katherine Dunn
The novel is the story of a traveling carnival run by Aloysius "Al" Binewski and his wife "Crystal" Lil. When the business begins to fail, the couple devise an idea to breed their own freak show, using various drugs and radioactive material to alter the genes of their children. Who emerges are Arturo ("Arty"), a boy with flippers for hands and feet; Electra ("Elly") and Iphigenia ("Iphy"), the Siamese Twins; Olympia ("Oly"), the hunchback albino dwarf; and Fortunato ("Chick"), the normal-looking telekinetic baby of the family, as well as a number of stillborns kept preserved in jars in a special wing of the freak show.
Oly tells the story of her family in the form of a novel written for her daughter Miranda.
Plot summary
Two time periods are covered: the first deals with the Binewski children's constant vicious struggle against each other through life. They especially have to deal with Arty as he develops his own cult: Arturism. Arturism involves members having their limbs amputated so that they can be like Arty, the cult leader, in their search for the principle he calls PIP ("Peace, Isolation, Purity"). Each member moves up in stages, losing increasingly significant chunks of their limbs, starting with their toes and fingers. As Arty battles his siblings to maintain control over his followers, competition between their respective freak shows slowly begins to take over their lives.
The second story is set in the present and is centered on Oly's daughter, Miranda. In her early twenties, Miranda does not know Oly is her mother. She lives on a trust fund created by Oly before she gave up her daughter to be raised by nuns. This had been urged by her brother Arturo, who was also Miranda's father (via Chick's telekinesis.) Oly lives in the same rooming house as Miranda so she can "spy" on her. Miranda has a special defect of her own, a small tail, which she flaunts at a local fetish strip club. There she meets Mary Lick, who tries to convince her to have the tail cut off. Lick is a wealthy woman who pays poor but attractive women to get disfiguring operations so they may live up to their potential instead of becoming sex objects. Oly plans to stop Lick in order to protect her daughter.
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