Geek Love is the third novel published by Katherine Dunn. The book was published in 1989, eighteen years after her second novel, Truck. Although published in 1989, Dunn actually finished writing it a decade earlier. It would take her nearly as long to get the book published as it took to compose it.
The novel continues Dunn's obsession with the plight of being an outsider within mainstream society as it centers upon a traveling freakshow. Indeed, the title refers not to modern-day connotations of geekdom but rather to the 20th century term for those on the lowest run of the carnival ladder. The narrative combines two distinct storylines which are each narrated by a single character, Olympia, an albino hunchbacked dwarf. The twin narratives intermingle within two different time periods with one focusing on Olympia's parents and siblings and the other focusing on Olympia's daughter, Miranda, who does not realize that the narrator is her mother.
Though published just before the dawn of the 1990s, Dunn has revealed that the origin of the story traces back to her experiences in 1970s Portland. That decade was the one which gave rise to the mainstream awareness of cults and one of the most infamous—the Jonestown cult of Jim Jones which resulted in mass deaths following the consumption of poisoned fruit drink—became a primary contributor to the story thematically and even narratively. For instance, the central conceit of the tale involves a carnival-owning husband who convinces his wife to breed children by consuming a poisonous cocktail of drugs and radioactive material. The result is a genetic mutation resulting in deformities which turn the babies into sideshow freaks as well as the offspring of the parents. This semi-gothic grotesquerie is the foundation upon which Dunn pursues themes related to outsider status, the Other versus normality, and the comparison of freakshows to everyday mainstream existence. In an author's note addendum to the book, Dunn reveals that photo spreads of Nazi concentration camps in Life Magazine were also instrumental in the formulation of the story.
Mixed critical reception hints at the problematic period Dunn experienced between completion and publication. The uncomfortable subject matter had to be gotten over first and many initial reviewers never managed that hurdle. Those that could get past the subject matter, however, were often thwarted in an attempt to find any deep meaning beneath the equally fantastical and repulsive premise. In addition, the book faced the hurdle of being published with a cover featuring then-uncommon fonts and cover design. Excerpts from the novel originally appeared in Mississippi Mud Book of Days in 1983 and, in 1988, within Looking Glass Bookstore Review. In 1989, the book was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Along with E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Geek Love surprisingly lost out to the relatively forgotten Spartina by John Casey. Tim Burton purchased the rights to make a film adaptation of the novel in 1990s, but as of 2023 it remains unproduced.
