It works: Lil gives birth to a boy with flippers for hands and feet, a set of Siamese twins joined at the waist, a hunchback albino dwarf, and a regular-looking baby with telekinetic powers. Their methods are experimental and more than a little disturbing: They mess with their own DNA and biochemistry using various drugs, insecticides, and radioactive materials. (The titular “geek” refers to a sideshow performer who bites the heads off chickens.) When some of the show’s performers defect, its proprietors-Aloysius and Crystal Lil Binewski-decide to breed their own stable of freaks. It’s the tale of a circus sideshow called the Binewski Carnival Fabulon that hits hard times. The book is Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, a dazzling oddball masterpiece published 25 years ago this month. They make you feel like you’re being let in on this secret. “Certain books,” he says, “are so imaginative that they suck you into a world that you’d never known existed. Flea, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist, adores it. It made me ashamed to be so utterly normal.” In the ’90s, Harry Anderson, the magician and actor (he played the Judge on Night Court) optioned the film rights and wrote a movie script himself. Terry Gilliam-former Monty Pythonite and the director of Time Bandits, Brazil, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-calls it “the most romantic novel about love and family I have read. Geek Love has inspired a sprawling universe of fan art, including this oil and watercolor by Brandon Zimmerman that depicts the novel's conjoined twins, Electra and Iphigenia Binewski.
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