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Review: Katherine Dunn - Geek Love (1989)
I really appreciated this book for leaning into its concept. It may not be for everyone, but I appreciated that Dunn really leaned into the full spirit of the freak show. I would recommend this book for people who want to read about dysfunctional who are terrible to one another.
Spoilers.
Story
The story took place in th past and present timelines.
The past timeline was about the traveling freak show of the Binewski family. Aloysius ‘Al’ and Lilian ‘Crystal Lil’ Binewski decided to breed their own freak show, by pumping Lil full of drugs so that her children would be born with various defects. The way they described it to each other, they were giving their children the innate gift to make money (by being freak shows). As the children grew older, the relations between the family members were more fleshed out.
Arty wanted to be the boss of the whole circus. He had his own cult. Oly and Chick were also loyal to him. Oly was loyal to him specifically, whereas Chick had a complex and just wanted to be loved. Arty struggled with Iphy and Elly though. Iphy was the kind one, that Arty liked. However, Iphy was intertwined with Elly, and Elly butted heads with Arty. Al and Lil were quite hands off. Al used to be something of a patriarch, but only until Arty was old enough. Very soon it became clear that he had no power or influence. As for Lil, she was barely functional because of the drugs and other treatments she’d gone through. She wanted to play at being mother, but like Al, the relationships between her children were way out of her hands.
The past story line culminated in a few events coming together at the same time. Arty was finally dismissing his cult of amputation. He had also ordered a lobotomy on Elly. Elly and Iphy gave birth to their child Mumpo. Iphy loved Mumpo, and killed Elly for killing Mumpo. And when Chick and Oly went to tell Arty, a fire broke out, with only Lil, Ol, and Horst surviving.
In the present story line, Oly lived alone in an apartment building. Lil was another resident but she was so drugged up that she no longer knew anything or anyone, and definitely did not know that Oly was her daughter. Another resident was Miranda, Arty and Oly’s child through artificial insemination (via Chick’s powers). She grew up believing she was an orphan who had a trust fund. She befriended Oly as she was an artist with a fascination for deformity, having one herself in the form of a tail. Miranda revealed to Oly that a rich woman, Mary Lick, offered her money to cut off her tail. Oly then went on a journey to discover Mary’s motivations and to stop her from enabling Miranda’s surgery. The present story line ended with Oly and Mary dying in a scuffle. Oly delivered the history of the Binewskis to Miranda in the form of a letter and keys to her room.
The bulk of this book lay in the power struggle and dysfunctional relationships of the Binewski family. They were all terrible to each other. It was partially related to their deformities that they were this way, but a part of that was their innate personalities. The middle parts of the book could get gruelling, writing about life in the traveling circus through the eyes of Oly who worshipped Arty (who is insufferable). But I do appreciate that they set the tone because I felt the personalities of the Binewskis were very well fleshed out despite there being many of them.
The dysfunctional Binewski family dynamics were bookended by Oly’s thoughts that she developed after her life in the circus. While she worshipped Arty, she did grow to have her own thoughts and she grew to have some self respect and pride. She tried to act on it in the end and I would say that she succeeded.
Writing
As I said, I appreciated Dunn for leaning into the concept of the freak show. I’d read some reviews from readers who felt disgusted by the material. The body horror, the incest, the poor family dynamics. But I was lapping it up. We don’t often get books that are unapologetically disgusting, and I don’t mean it necessarily just in the physical sense of the body horror. I mean in the sense that these people have twisted moral compasses and there is no redemption. I don’t need any of these people to have a heart of gold, I just need them to make sense, which they do given the very poor family environment they grew up in thanks to Al and Lil Binewski.
I will say I thought that the circus fire was a bit sudden and not a very satisfying conclusion to the past story line. I think perhaps it was a way for Dunn to close the book on the past storyline without needing to address any straggling characters, so that she could focus on developing current Oly’s personality. That being said, I felt that having Lil as the only other remaining Binewski was a bit weak, as she probably had the least fleshed out personality out of all the Binewskis.
Characters
Aloysius ‘Al’ Binewski
I thought that Al would be a more imposing and intimidating character. After all, he was the patriarch of the Binewski family. He (and Lil) were the masterminds behind the Binewski Dreamlets. But was we found out more about him, we realized he was kind of an idiot. He fancied himself a doctor by reading texts and prescribing drugs to Lil. But he didn’t know what he was doing. Nor did he have the power to control the family as it grew larger.
There was a story line when Chick was young and Al would take him to casinos to steal from people. Oly noted that Al seemed to adore Chick because he was the one child who looked normal, and Al could take him out and pretend like he was a normal father with a normal son. None of the other children could go out without being stared at because of their physical deformities, and presumably Lil was not in best shape because of the drugs. It hinted that Al was sometimes tired of the life he’d created for him and his family. He didn’t have the power to control it and he wanted to run away. So he was a bit of a coward.
As Arty grew older, it felt like Al was happy to hand over the reins to him. He faded very easily into the background. He supported everything that Arty did. When the twins didn’t want to have a child, Al insisted that it was fine and that it was a good thing. He was basically useless.
A sad, sad man who didn’t get nearly everything that he deserved. I mean that in the sense that he didn’t get the karma that should have been coming to him for building this family.
Lillian Hinchliff/Crystal Lil Binewski
Lil was the mother of the Binewski family. She had run away from her family to join the circus an took the name of Crystal Lil. I don’t remember what her act was, but the story goes that she agreed with Al to birth babies that could be a freak show on their own.
I think Lil wanted so bad to act like a normal loving mother, a normal suburban mom just caring for her kids. We learned that when Lil birthed children that seemed to not have any defects, Al would force her to abandon them, because they couldn’t take care of a child if they couldn’t pay for themselves through the freak show. They also had children that didn’t make it, obviously because of their deformities. By the time it was time to give Chick away, Lil was reluctant. She naturally had a want to protect her child and be close to them, but I think in her older age, she was leaning more towards wanting to be a mom than a breeder of circus performers.
Like Al, Crystal Lil faded into the background really easily as soon as the kids were old enough. She and Al were really ignorant to the power struggles between the kids. She seemed to dote on Chick, hating that he was being put to work so hard as the anaesthetist and then the surgeon. She kept insisting that Chick needed time to play and be a child, but we know it was all in vain because she already had no power in the family and she knew it. When Iphy and Elly were pregnant, Lil wanted to pretend that this was a normal occurrence, and she was thrilled about being a first-time grandma. She was just completely shut off from (or purposely ignorant of) the power struggles that led to Iphy and Elly’s baby.
When the fire broke out in the circus, Lil was very out of it, climbing over a dead Al and telling him that they’d have to breed a new freak show. And that makes me think that Arty did what Al could not, which was to have a cult. I think Al had a cult of one, which was Lil, who believed his idea that breeding a freak show was an act of love for their children But we see here that maybe it was also kind of a sexual thing for the two of them too.
In the present day, Lil was completely not lucid. She didn’t recognize Oly as her daughter. She lived in her own little world. Oly cared for her, though in a bit of a detached way. Oly cared for her because she was a Binewski and her mother, but in the sense that a mother was part of the family, and not because she loved her mother for taking care of her as a child.
Arturo ‘Arty’ Binewski
Arty was Aqua Boy, a boy with webbed skin. He was the oldest and the most ambitious. He always wanted to be the top selling act. Oly had no problem being subservient to him; she adored him. Arty struggled with Elly and Iphy, who were a little older than Oly (but younger than Arty) but didn’t really accept his bullshit. Iphy got along with Arty, and I think Arty quite liked her as well. But Elly would butt heads with Arty, and Iphy and Elly were tight. Arty loved to bully Chick and take advantage of his people-pleasing ways.
As soon as he was old enough, Arty was already taking control of his own life in the circus. He was getting his own trailer, and he was developing new ways to grow his act, with his fortune telling. He also started to have a bunch of groupies, and using his charisma, Arty developed a cult. The Arturan cult was about amputating oneself gradually to reach a heightened state of being. It was very twisted but somehow Arty was able to convince people, and to hire a doctor who would do the amputations. He’d also rope in a young but willing to please Chick to be the assistant, an anaesthetist, until it was time to be rid of the doctor.
Arty had no trouble controlling the cult as well as the family. It was Iphy and Elly who were the problem. He took major issue when Iphy and Elly were doing things without the knowledge, amid all the surveillance he had in the form of his loyal followers and family members. He was very surprised and unhappy to know that Iphy and Elly were prostituting themselves without his knowledge. The betrothal of Iphy and Elly to the Bag Man was meant to be a punishment, knowing that the twins would not want him. That was thwarted by Lil who suddenly realized the Bag Man as the attempted murderer from years ago. The eventual punishments came in the form of stopping the abortion (which Elly and Iphy had run away to a clinic to get done), as well as the lobotomy of Elly, which would eventually drive the twins apart. It was a very cruel thing he did to the twins, and Chick didn’t approve of it.
If I remember correctly, Arty had Dr. Phyllis killed, and a young Chick was to replace her as the surgeon of the cult. Obviously this was a terrible idea because Chick was still a literal child, but Arty was banking on Chick being supremely loyal to him. Eventually, Arty dismissed his cult and returned their fees to them. I don’t quite remember the reason. I think it might just have been that it was too expensive to support them.
There was also the short story line in which Oly asked Chick to impregnate her with Arty’s sperm. I forgot how Arty found out, but he was unhappy about it. But I think Oly’s perspective of Arty changed from then on. He didn’t care for their child, but Oly found herself caring more for their child than for Arty himself. She had to give Miranda away to protect her, but from then on I could tell she no longer spoke of Arty with as much worship and reverence as before.
Arty died in the fire so his character arc didn’t go anywhere nor was it really resolved. So we were meant to remember him the way that Oly did. Despite her tampering down her love for her brother later, she still recalled him with fondness, with the worship that she had for him.
Personally, I fucking hate Arty and I think that was the point. He was a control freak who needed to be better than everyone else. He was born to be a cult leader, a fake who needed the blind worship of others. Elly and Iphy irked him because he couldn’t control them. While their ‘punishment’ was coming, I think he could also feel that what he’d done to the twins was cruel and gruelling, and I felt that he’d changed after that too.
Electra ‘Elly’ Binewski
Elly was one half of the twins. I originally thought Elly and Iphy were connected at the hip, but I later realized that they shared a lower body. Somehow I only realized this when they grew sexually active.
Growing up, Elly was the meaner of the twins. She was nasty to all of the other siblings, including Iphy. She knew that Iphy and Arty had a thing, she knew that Oly and Chick were loyal to Arty. And that was why Elly would not give anything to Arty. Elly was also mean to Iphy sometimes, doing things to spite Iphy. But there was also a deep understanding between the two, that comes naturally with being together all the time.
When the twins decided it was time to have sex, they asked Oly to pass a note to a man asking if he wanted to have sex, and if so, to give them $50 for it. Elly insisted that Oly give the note. Iphy was really embarrassed about it and had said that she’d wanted to save her first time for someone special. Until then, we still saw Elly as the mean and loud one and Iphy as the nice and shy one. But we later found that Elly was mean but impulsive, while Iphy was pleasant but resolute. They’d asked their former piano teacher to become their pimp, and he insisted that Iphy was the mean one who had forced to do it. When the twins struggled with Arty, there were also times when Elly preferred to retreat while Iphy wanted to push forward. It showed that the twins together were strong as they backed each other up.
There was a scene in which Iphy revealed that she’d had a romance with a boy. Elly was understanding, and would be quiet so that Iphy could send time with him. But when the romance got serious, Elly had stopped her from progressing further, because it would hurt the boy for him to be tangled with Iphy and Elly. And Iphy realized what Elly was saying, that they were monsters and had no business tarnishing someone as pleasant as that nice boy. And it was such a sweet moment to me because Elly understood what it meant to Iphy to have this romance for her, but that it’d only lead to resentment and disgust if she really went ahead with that boy.
After years of struggle, Arty finally exacted his final punishments. He had the twins’ abortion stopped, but the cruelest thing he did was the lobotomy. He’d asked Dr. Phyllis about the possibility of splitting the twins, and Dr. Phyllis had said they’d have to sacrifice one of the twins (because they shared a lower half). In the end, a lobotomy was conducted on Elly and she became a shell of herself that Iphy had to support all the time.
After the pregnancy, the family would say that Elly was slowly coming back. But Elly met her end by the hands of Iphy. Apparently, Elly had killed Mumpo, so Iphy killed her. Was that the truth? I’m not really sure. I do recognize that Iphy cared for Mumpo, but did she care for Mumpo more than Elly? In my mind, I couldn’t really see that happening. But maybe it was the truth, or maybe Iphy was just finding an excuse to put them all out of their misery after Mumpo died.
It seemed like in their youth, Elly tried to rebel against the growing power of Arty in the only way she could. She pushed back against Arty, she tried to annoy Iphy into having her back as well. But in the end, she was protective of herself and Iphy. And for that she became Arty’s top enemy. It was cruel of him to split the twins when they didn’t know how to be apart from each other. But he didn’t even split them fully, Elly just became a shell of herself and not knowing what was happening. Like Lil.
Iphigenia ‘Iphy’ Binewski
Iphy was the other twin. As mentioned, she was known as the kind one. She got along with Arty. I think there was a mild romance between them, which made Oly jealous of Iphy. Iphy was supposed to be the sweet one, the romantic. That was why it was such a big deal for her to have had a romance with that sweet boy. That was why it was not ideal for her to have lost her virginity to some man who paid for it.
I think it was after the twins started having sex that Iphy changed. As mentioned, the piano teacher said that Iphy was surprisingly the scary one. I think it was just that Iphy was just better at doing what she needed to get what she wanted. When she was young, the things she wanted were easy to get through kindness and sweetness, like the love of her siblings. As she grew older, she had to be more steadfast.
Iphy definitely hardened with the pregnancy. She resented Arty for all that he did, saddling them with the baby that they didn’t want, and then later lobotomizing Elly. There were moments when Iphy showed care to Elly, showing that she still loved her even if she wasn’t who she used to be. I wonder if Iphy grew resentful of Elly for literally being dead weight. Was that why Iphy killed Elly? Was it truly because Elly had harmed Mumpo? I’m really not sure.
The twins are so intertwined so it felt a bit weird to split up their sections because they do everything together, but they are two different personalities so I felt I had to. But they were strongest when they were together.
I think they had a bad/sad ending. Their last days were spent pregnant with a baby they didn’t want, surrounded by false happiness. Arty, Al, and Lil were all happy about the pregnancy. Chick was not, because he knew that the twins didn’t want it. And things got worse when Elly was lobotomized. It was crazy how Lil just acted like nothing was wrong when it was clear that everything was wrong. Arty essentially killed Elly. Now that I think about it, did Iphy kill Elly and Mumpo so that they could escape this life? Or did she truly grow resentful of Elly and kill her for killing Mumpo? Again, I just can’t imagine Iphy loving Mumpo more than Elly. So in my opinion both of these possibilities (either murder-suicide or murder as revenge) are bad endings.
Olympia ‘Oly’ Binewski/Hoppalng McGurk
Oly was our narrator. As a younger child, and one who was not as visibly or brilliantly deformed at the others, she knew she took a backseat. She didn’t even have her own act in the circus. Her job was to orate and announce. Oly worshipped Arty, doing whatever he wanted. She took care of him, and did all his bidding. This was even the case in her later teen years, when she sort of knew that what Arty was doing was bad, but she wanted him to rely on her so bad.
There was a scene in which Oly was comforting Chick and she was thinking that all Chick needed to do earn her love was to need her. That showed that Oly was aware of her own weakness. Maybe she knew that Arty was manipulating her. Her love extended beyond familial. She was romantically in love with him as well, which was why she didn’t like that Iphy got along well with Arty.
Oly was a bit of a backseat observer for most of the past story line. The takeaway was her deep feelings of connections to Binewski and deformity.
In the present, Oly was reconnecting with Miranda, though as a friend. In secret, Oly was still protective of her as her mother. When she found out that Mary had approached Miranda to cut off her tail, Oly couldn’t have that. As a Binewski, she grew up and continued to believe that deformity made who she was, and that she must be proud of being deformed. I think she was secretly pleased that Miranda had come to appreciate her tail, since she was seen as sexually desired at the fetish club where she performed with her tail. And she couldn’t have Mary coming along and telling Miranda that she was better as a normie, because Miranda was a Binewski after all. So Oly concocted a plan to understand Mary’s motivations, and afterwards, kill Mary. Oly sort of succeeded but not in the way that she wanted. She wanted the death to be quick but it didn’t work out that way. It ended in both her death and Mary’s, but I still consider Oly having succeeded as she both killed Mary, and left her writings to Miranda that would hopefully convince her to be proud of who she was.
Fortunato ‘Chick’ Binewski
Chick was the youngest Binewski. Al and Lil had initially thought that he was a normal child, and thus they’d have to abandon him. Al was very careful about not leaving any clues so that they couldn’t be tracked. So he was very eager for Lil to abandon the baby at a specific time when there was no surveillance. Meanwhile, Lil was very reluctant to leave the baby. I think it might have been because they’d had a spate of ‘failed’ babies. In any case, as they left the baby, Chick had used his powers to move Lil back to him for feeding. As a baby, Chick already showed telekinesis.
As I mentioned earlier, Al would bring Chick to the casino to steal wallets. But it became clear to the family that Al enjoyed looking normal for once, which made them feel a bit abandoned, made them feel angry that he wanted out when he had created them. It was Arty who had hired some people to rough up Al and threaten to kidnap Chick. That scared Al enough that he would never do it again.
Chick, like Oly, yearned to be needed. As the youngest, he obviously chased after his older siblings. Arty hated Chick and so Chick did everything to try to earn his favour. As for Iphy and Elly, they were nicer with Chick. Oly was indifferent to Chick, because her top priority would always be Arty.
Chick naturally developed his powers more as he grew older. Once, he explained to Oly that his power involved allowing motion. He used the example of water in a tank. If a hole was made in the tank, water would naturally flow out. He just needed to create holes to let things go where they needed to go.
Arty assigned Chick to be Dr. Phyllis’ assistant. First he was the anaesthetist, as he could control a part of patients’ brains to suppress the pain. Later, he’d become the surgeon at a very young and illegal age.
Towards the end, Chick started to show a little more of his own feelings. He and Oly had their own friendship, as the two younger kids. Oly had asked Chick to impregnate her with Arty’s sperm. And Chick did it as a favour to Oly. As well, Chick said on a few occasions that he disproved of what Arty had done to the twins.
Chick didn’t have much closure either. He died in the fire.
Chick is someone like Oly, except we see how Oly could have turned worse if she had a power that Arty wanted to take advantage of.
Miranda Barker
Miranda was Oly’s daughter by Arty. Arty forced Oly to give Miranda away as a baby to a nunnery. Miranda grew up believing she was an orphan. When she grew older, she had access to a trust fund that allowed her to live in the building that Lil and Oly lived in. She was in school studying art and was great at drawing anatomy. She bonded with Oly because she always drew something a bit odd for a competition every year and that year she wanted to draw Oly. Miranda also worked as a stripper at the fetish club as she had a tail.
Miranda didn’t know that Oly was her mother, but she bonded with her as a friend over both having deformities. Miranda was a peppy and optimistic girl. She definitely would not have grown up that way if she’d lived with the Binewskis. Miranda had to do a bit of convincing to get Oly to agree to be her model, but Oly agreed. By all accounts, Miranda was just a normal girl who happened to be fascinated with the grotesque. And to Oly’s surprise, through stripping she had come to appreciate her own deformity.
Oly was upset that Miranda was considering cutting off her tail, and made it her mission to stop it. Miranda was considering it, because Mary was offering lots of money. She wanted to think she was indifferent to her tail. She was of course made fun of for having a tail, but she came to be ok with it through stripping. Would it make a difference if she had the tail or not? It would if she was a Binewski. That was what Oly thought.
Towards the end, I think Miranda could tell Oly was growing distant. Maybe it was because she was going ahead with the surgery. Maybe it was because Oly was busy with the planned assassination. She was trying to get Oly to react by telling her that she was doing the surgery for sure.
Considering that Mary died, I’m guessing Miranda never did do the surgery. The book ended with a letter from Oly to Miranda, telling her the truth of her family, and imploring her to understand. This will be Oly’s legacy, to understand that she is perfect the way she is, and that she is who she is because of her deformities. In a way, it’s a sweet way to end the novel, isn’t it?
Dr. Phyllis
Dr. Phyllis was the strange doctor who was hired to be the surgeon of the Arturan cult. In an old clipping, we were told that Dr. Phyllis had once conducted surgery on herself, believing that there was a device inside her. She got tired when she had to close herself back up and that’s when she called the ambulance. But the doctors noted that the surgical work was pretty good. It was also revealed that she had falsified her academic records in order to get into medical school. However, she was a good student.
Dr. Phyllis was a very cold and unpleasant woman. She just did her job of amputation and that was it. I think it was Oly who had approached Dr. Phyllis to ask something about babies (possibly the twins’ pregnancy) and Dr. Phyllis had noted that she was not trained on obstetrics and basically avoided answering anything and waved Oly off. Oly had noted that that was the most she’d spoken to Dr. Phyllis ever, an she was so unpleasant. Still, she did what Arty wanted.
Arty had Chick be Dr. Phyllis’ understudy until one day he could replace Dr. Phyllis with Chick as the cult surgeon. I believe she was killed and just delivered away from the cult grounds.
Vern Bogner/the Bag Man
Bogner was a man who had attempted murder on the Binewski children. He tried to shoot them when they were in public once when they were young. He didn’t make another appearance until years later, coming to the Arturan Cult to be a crony of Arty. It was a strange turn of events. We find out that his marriage and family life failed and he tried to shoot himself in the face. He failed to kill himself and ended up having to wear a bag over his head because of his deformities. Arty put him in charge of spying on the twins, and it was through the Bag Man that he found out about their sexual activities.
Arty ‘gave’ the twins to the Bag Man. The twins saw it as him prostituting them to him, but he saw it as marriage. All the while, Lil had a weird feeling about the Bag Man. It was when the Bag Man made sexual advances to the twins that she shot him, realizing that he was the attempted murderer all those years ago.
Mary Lick
Mary Lick was the daughter of a very rich man and thus had tons of money at her disposal. She had offered Miranda lots of money to get her tail cut off, so Oly investigated Mary and her motivations. Miranda had briefly said that Mary got a kick out of permanently changing people.
Oly befriended Mary, and she would take swimming lessons with Mary. As they grew closer, Mary would show Oly her collection of women. Mary explained that she felt women were most liberated when they were free of the features that made them attractive to men. Her first woman was someone who had been very pretty, but after she got into a terrible accident and was not so pretty anymore, she became an amazing scientist. That was Mary’s reasoning, though I think Oly wondered if Mary was just insecure about beautiful women.
In the end, that didn’t change what Oly needed to do. She needed to stop Mary from enabling Miranda’s surgery. So she concocted a plan to kill Mary. The plan didn’t quite work as Mary didn’t die immediately and was suffering. Mary had a gun in her locker and from police reports, they were both killed by gunshot.
Themes
Deformity
Right from the beginning, deformity was painted to be a good thing. Al and Lil said it was a gift for their children to be able to make money just from being freak shows from birth. It sounded romantic when they were saying it, but on thinking back, the logic is a bit flawed.
The Binewski family saw deformity as something to be proud of. The more shocking the deformity, the more highly regarded the were. That was why Chick was looked down upon. He looked too normal. It’s an interesting reversal of what many of us are used to.
And it’s most interesting seeing it how Oly sees the world when she integrates into society, living in a fixed location in an urban population. She still sees deformity as something to be proud of. She feels powerful because people look at her and feel nervous or afraid, wondering what had happened to her. She feels powerful because people are puzzled and shocked when Oly feels no fear at her own deformity. At the fetish club, they had an ‘audition’ show that was clearly just meant to humiliate people. A bunch of people were dragged on stage to strip, including Oly. But she outweirded them by stripping and dancing with no shame. That was her superpower.
As well, to Oly, her deformity was tied very much to being a proud Binewski. Every Binewski had to be proud of their deformities.
Family
The family politics were really intense. As I mentioned, I was shocked at how little of a role Al and Lil played in the family as soon as the children grew to their teen years. Remember, Arty was a teenager when he was already starting his group that eventually became a cult. In my opinion they were wilfully ignorant. They wanted to believe they were so smart and enlightened for their idea of family, but the truth was that they were not smart enough to keep the family in peace.
Arty was born to be a cult leader. Oly noted that one of the changes he made to his act was just to spew random fortune telling that was based on nothing. But somehow people believed him because he was different and therefore enlightened. For Arty, he just loved the attention. And he had Oly and Chick falling into his trap too. The issue was Iphy and Elly. And this conflict led to the climax of the past story line.
The Binewski family also lived in seclusion. There were other people who worked in the circus that weren’t part of the family, but they were always separate. And I think it was this isolation that led to the incestuous thoughts. The only person who ever knew what a normal family was like was Lil. She was the only one ever trying to enforce normal family relationships. Al’s father had owned the circus before him, so I doubt either of them had a concept of normal family relationships either. So for the kids, they mix all their feelings together and don’t interpret them the same way that most other people do.
Cult
The Arturan Cult is honestly terrifying to me. A cult of people who aspire to be amputated? Horrifying. Oly was just at the edge of it and the teachings of the cult were never relevant to her because she was a Binewski.
Arty had rules on who could be allowed into the cult. I remember it was basically children and people who were mentally infirm who were not allowed into the cult. But everyone else was game and they also had to bring a cult fee with them. Whenever the circus travelled, the cult would have to follow along at their own expense. It was clearly also a cash grab, but we know Arty got off on being able to manipulate these people to get amputated. I’m afraid that if I knew any more about the cult that the book would actually be too scary for me
Overall
An interesting read. Not for everyone, but I truly appreciated that it leaned in to the premise and really explored the messed up family borne out of messed up principles an ethos.
Spoilers.
Story
The story took place in th past and present timelines.
The past timeline was about the traveling freak show of the Binewski family. Aloysius ‘Al’ and Lilian ‘Crystal Lil’ Binewski decided to breed their own freak show, by pumping Lil full of drugs so that her children would be born with various defects. The way they described it to each other, they were giving their children the innate gift to make money (by being freak shows). As the children grew older, the relations between the family members were more fleshed out.
Arty wanted to be the boss of the whole circus. He had his own cult. Oly and Chick were also loyal to him. Oly was loyal to him specifically, whereas Chick had a complex and just wanted to be loved. Arty struggled with Iphy and Elly though. Iphy was the kind one, that Arty liked. However, Iphy was intertwined with Elly, and Elly butted heads with Arty. Al and Lil were quite hands off. Al used to be something of a patriarch, but only until Arty was old enough. Very soon it became clear that he had no power or influence. As for Lil, she was barely functional because of the drugs and other treatments she’d gone through. She wanted to play at being mother, but like Al, the relationships between her children were way out of her hands.
The past story line culminated in a few events coming together at the same time. Arty was finally dismissing his cult of amputation. He had also ordered a lobotomy on Elly. Elly and Iphy gave birth to their child Mumpo. Iphy loved Mumpo, and killed Elly for killing Mumpo. And when Chick and Oly went to tell Arty, a fire broke out, with only Lil, Ol, and Horst surviving.
In the present story line, Oly lived alone in an apartment building. Lil was another resident but she was so drugged up that she no longer knew anything or anyone, and definitely did not know that Oly was her daughter. Another resident was Miranda, Arty and Oly’s child through artificial insemination (via Chick’s powers). She grew up believing she was an orphan who had a trust fund. She befriended Oly as she was an artist with a fascination for deformity, having one herself in the form of a tail. Miranda revealed to Oly that a rich woman, Mary Lick, offered her money to cut off her tail. Oly then went on a journey to discover Mary’s motivations and to stop her from enabling Miranda’s surgery. The present story line ended with Oly and Mary dying in a scuffle. Oly delivered the history of the Binewskis to Miranda in the form of a letter and keys to her room.
The bulk of this book lay in the power struggle and dysfunctional relationships of the Binewski family. They were all terrible to each other. It was partially related to their deformities that they were this way, but a part of that was their innate personalities. The middle parts of the book could get gruelling, writing about life in the traveling circus through the eyes of Oly who worshipped Arty (who is insufferable). But I do appreciate that they set the tone because I felt the personalities of the Binewskis were very well fleshed out despite there being many of them.
The dysfunctional Binewski family dynamics were bookended by Oly’s thoughts that she developed after her life in the circus. While she worshipped Arty, she did grow to have her own thoughts and she grew to have some self respect and pride. She tried to act on it in the end and I would say that she succeeded.
Writing
As I said, I appreciated Dunn for leaning into the concept of the freak show. I’d read some reviews from readers who felt disgusted by the material. The body horror, the incest, the poor family dynamics. But I was lapping it up. We don’t often get books that are unapologetically disgusting, and I don’t mean it necessarily just in the physical sense of the body horror. I mean in the sense that these people have twisted moral compasses and there is no redemption. I don’t need any of these people to have a heart of gold, I just need them to make sense, which they do given the very poor family environment they grew up in thanks to Al and Lil Binewski.
I will say I thought that the circus fire was a bit sudden and not a very satisfying conclusion to the past story line. I think perhaps it was a way for Dunn to close the book on the past storyline without needing to address any straggling characters, so that she could focus on developing current Oly’s personality. That being said, I felt that having Lil as the only other remaining Binewski was a bit weak, as she probably had the least fleshed out personality out of all the Binewskis.
Characters
Aloysius ‘Al’ Binewski
I thought that Al would be a more imposing and intimidating character. After all, he was the patriarch of the Binewski family. He (and Lil) were the masterminds behind the Binewski Dreamlets. But was we found out more about him, we realized he was kind of an idiot. He fancied himself a doctor by reading texts and prescribing drugs to Lil. But he didn’t know what he was doing. Nor did he have the power to control the family as it grew larger.
There was a story line when Chick was young and Al would take him to casinos to steal from people. Oly noted that Al seemed to adore Chick because he was the one child who looked normal, and Al could take him out and pretend like he was a normal father with a normal son. None of the other children could go out without being stared at because of their physical deformities, and presumably Lil was not in best shape because of the drugs. It hinted that Al was sometimes tired of the life he’d created for him and his family. He didn’t have the power to control it and he wanted to run away. So he was a bit of a coward.
As Arty grew older, it felt like Al was happy to hand over the reins to him. He faded very easily into the background. He supported everything that Arty did. When the twins didn’t want to have a child, Al insisted that it was fine and that it was a good thing. He was basically useless.
A sad, sad man who didn’t get nearly everything that he deserved. I mean that in the sense that he didn’t get the karma that should have been coming to him for building this family.
Lillian Hinchliff/Crystal Lil Binewski
Lil was the mother of the Binewski family. She had run away from her family to join the circus an took the name of Crystal Lil. I don’t remember what her act was, but the story goes that she agreed with Al to birth babies that could be a freak show on their own.
I think Lil wanted so bad to act like a normal loving mother, a normal suburban mom just caring for her kids. We learned that when Lil birthed children that seemed to not have any defects, Al would force her to abandon them, because they couldn’t take care of a child if they couldn’t pay for themselves through the freak show. They also had children that didn’t make it, obviously because of their deformities. By the time it was time to give Chick away, Lil was reluctant. She naturally had a want to protect her child and be close to them, but I think in her older age, she was leaning more towards wanting to be a mom than a breeder of circus performers.
Like Al, Crystal Lil faded into the background really easily as soon as the kids were old enough. She and Al were really ignorant to the power struggles between the kids. She seemed to dote on Chick, hating that he was being put to work so hard as the anaesthetist and then the surgeon. She kept insisting that Chick needed time to play and be a child, but we know it was all in vain because she already had no power in the family and she knew it. When Iphy and Elly were pregnant, Lil wanted to pretend that this was a normal occurrence, and she was thrilled about being a first-time grandma. She was just completely shut off from (or purposely ignorant of) the power struggles that led to Iphy and Elly’s baby.
When the fire broke out in the circus, Lil was very out of it, climbing over a dead Al and telling him that they’d have to breed a new freak show. And that makes me think that Arty did what Al could not, which was to have a cult. I think Al had a cult of one, which was Lil, who believed his idea that breeding a freak show was an act of love for their children But we see here that maybe it was also kind of a sexual thing for the two of them too.
In the present day, Lil was completely not lucid. She didn’t recognize Oly as her daughter. She lived in her own little world. Oly cared for her, though in a bit of a detached way. Oly cared for her because she was a Binewski and her mother, but in the sense that a mother was part of the family, and not because she loved her mother for taking care of her as a child.
Arturo ‘Arty’ Binewski
Arty was Aqua Boy, a boy with webbed skin. He was the oldest and the most ambitious. He always wanted to be the top selling act. Oly had no problem being subservient to him; she adored him. Arty struggled with Elly and Iphy, who were a little older than Oly (but younger than Arty) but didn’t really accept his bullshit. Iphy got along with Arty, and I think Arty quite liked her as well. But Elly would butt heads with Arty, and Iphy and Elly were tight. Arty loved to bully Chick and take advantage of his people-pleasing ways.
As soon as he was old enough, Arty was already taking control of his own life in the circus. He was getting his own trailer, and he was developing new ways to grow his act, with his fortune telling. He also started to have a bunch of groupies, and using his charisma, Arty developed a cult. The Arturan cult was about amputating oneself gradually to reach a heightened state of being. It was very twisted but somehow Arty was able to convince people, and to hire a doctor who would do the amputations. He’d also rope in a young but willing to please Chick to be the assistant, an anaesthetist, until it was time to be rid of the doctor.
Arty had no trouble controlling the cult as well as the family. It was Iphy and Elly who were the problem. He took major issue when Iphy and Elly were doing things without the knowledge, amid all the surveillance he had in the form of his loyal followers and family members. He was very surprised and unhappy to know that Iphy and Elly were prostituting themselves without his knowledge. The betrothal of Iphy and Elly to the Bag Man was meant to be a punishment, knowing that the twins would not want him. That was thwarted by Lil who suddenly realized the Bag Man as the attempted murderer from years ago. The eventual punishments came in the form of stopping the abortion (which Elly and Iphy had run away to a clinic to get done), as well as the lobotomy of Elly, which would eventually drive the twins apart. It was a very cruel thing he did to the twins, and Chick didn’t approve of it.
If I remember correctly, Arty had Dr. Phyllis killed, and a young Chick was to replace her as the surgeon of the cult. Obviously this was a terrible idea because Chick was still a literal child, but Arty was banking on Chick being supremely loyal to him. Eventually, Arty dismissed his cult and returned their fees to them. I don’t quite remember the reason. I think it might just have been that it was too expensive to support them.
There was also the short story line in which Oly asked Chick to impregnate her with Arty’s sperm. I forgot how Arty found out, but he was unhappy about it. But I think Oly’s perspective of Arty changed from then on. He didn’t care for their child, but Oly found herself caring more for their child than for Arty himself. She had to give Miranda away to protect her, but from then on I could tell she no longer spoke of Arty with as much worship and reverence as before.
Arty died in the fire so his character arc didn’t go anywhere nor was it really resolved. So we were meant to remember him the way that Oly did. Despite her tampering down her love for her brother later, she still recalled him with fondness, with the worship that she had for him.
Personally, I fucking hate Arty and I think that was the point. He was a control freak who needed to be better than everyone else. He was born to be a cult leader, a fake who needed the blind worship of others. Elly and Iphy irked him because he couldn’t control them. While their ‘punishment’ was coming, I think he could also feel that what he’d done to the twins was cruel and gruelling, and I felt that he’d changed after that too.
Electra ‘Elly’ Binewski
Elly was one half of the twins. I originally thought Elly and Iphy were connected at the hip, but I later realized that they shared a lower body. Somehow I only realized this when they grew sexually active.
Growing up, Elly was the meaner of the twins. She was nasty to all of the other siblings, including Iphy. She knew that Iphy and Arty had a thing, she knew that Oly and Chick were loyal to Arty. And that was why Elly would not give anything to Arty. Elly was also mean to Iphy sometimes, doing things to spite Iphy. But there was also a deep understanding between the two, that comes naturally with being together all the time.
When the twins decided it was time to have sex, they asked Oly to pass a note to a man asking if he wanted to have sex, and if so, to give them $50 for it. Elly insisted that Oly give the note. Iphy was really embarrassed about it and had said that she’d wanted to save her first time for someone special. Until then, we still saw Elly as the mean and loud one and Iphy as the nice and shy one. But we later found that Elly was mean but impulsive, while Iphy was pleasant but resolute. They’d asked their former piano teacher to become their pimp, and he insisted that Iphy was the mean one who had forced to do it. When the twins struggled with Arty, there were also times when Elly preferred to retreat while Iphy wanted to push forward. It showed that the twins together were strong as they backed each other up.
There was a scene in which Iphy revealed that she’d had a romance with a boy. Elly was understanding, and would be quiet so that Iphy could send time with him. But when the romance got serious, Elly had stopped her from progressing further, because it would hurt the boy for him to be tangled with Iphy and Elly. And Iphy realized what Elly was saying, that they were monsters and had no business tarnishing someone as pleasant as that nice boy. And it was such a sweet moment to me because Elly understood what it meant to Iphy to have this romance for her, but that it’d only lead to resentment and disgust if she really went ahead with that boy.
After years of struggle, Arty finally exacted his final punishments. He had the twins’ abortion stopped, but the cruelest thing he did was the lobotomy. He’d asked Dr. Phyllis about the possibility of splitting the twins, and Dr. Phyllis had said they’d have to sacrifice one of the twins (because they shared a lower half). In the end, a lobotomy was conducted on Elly and she became a shell of herself that Iphy had to support all the time.
After the pregnancy, the family would say that Elly was slowly coming back. But Elly met her end by the hands of Iphy. Apparently, Elly had killed Mumpo, so Iphy killed her. Was that the truth? I’m not really sure. I do recognize that Iphy cared for Mumpo, but did she care for Mumpo more than Elly? In my mind, I couldn’t really see that happening. But maybe it was the truth, or maybe Iphy was just finding an excuse to put them all out of their misery after Mumpo died.
It seemed like in their youth, Elly tried to rebel against the growing power of Arty in the only way she could. She pushed back against Arty, she tried to annoy Iphy into having her back as well. But in the end, she was protective of herself and Iphy. And for that she became Arty’s top enemy. It was cruel of him to split the twins when they didn’t know how to be apart from each other. But he didn’t even split them fully, Elly just became a shell of herself and not knowing what was happening. Like Lil.
Iphigenia ‘Iphy’ Binewski
Iphy was the other twin. As mentioned, she was known as the kind one. She got along with Arty. I think there was a mild romance between them, which made Oly jealous of Iphy. Iphy was supposed to be the sweet one, the romantic. That was why it was such a big deal for her to have had a romance with that sweet boy. That was why it was not ideal for her to have lost her virginity to some man who paid for it.
I think it was after the twins started having sex that Iphy changed. As mentioned, the piano teacher said that Iphy was surprisingly the scary one. I think it was just that Iphy was just better at doing what she needed to get what she wanted. When she was young, the things she wanted were easy to get through kindness and sweetness, like the love of her siblings. As she grew older, she had to be more steadfast.
Iphy definitely hardened with the pregnancy. She resented Arty for all that he did, saddling them with the baby that they didn’t want, and then later lobotomizing Elly. There were moments when Iphy showed care to Elly, showing that she still loved her even if she wasn’t who she used to be. I wonder if Iphy grew resentful of Elly for literally being dead weight. Was that why Iphy killed Elly? Was it truly because Elly had harmed Mumpo? I’m really not sure.
The twins are so intertwined so it felt a bit weird to split up their sections because they do everything together, but they are two different personalities so I felt I had to. But they were strongest when they were together.
I think they had a bad/sad ending. Their last days were spent pregnant with a baby they didn’t want, surrounded by false happiness. Arty, Al, and Lil were all happy about the pregnancy. Chick was not, because he knew that the twins didn’t want it. And things got worse when Elly was lobotomized. It was crazy how Lil just acted like nothing was wrong when it was clear that everything was wrong. Arty essentially killed Elly. Now that I think about it, did Iphy kill Elly and Mumpo so that they could escape this life? Or did she truly grow resentful of Elly and kill her for killing Mumpo? Again, I just can’t imagine Iphy loving Mumpo more than Elly. So in my opinion both of these possibilities (either murder-suicide or murder as revenge) are bad endings.
Olympia ‘Oly’ Binewski/Hoppalng McGurk
Oly was our narrator. As a younger child, and one who was not as visibly or brilliantly deformed at the others, she knew she took a backseat. She didn’t even have her own act in the circus. Her job was to orate and announce. Oly worshipped Arty, doing whatever he wanted. She took care of him, and did all his bidding. This was even the case in her later teen years, when she sort of knew that what Arty was doing was bad, but she wanted him to rely on her so bad.
There was a scene in which Oly was comforting Chick and she was thinking that all Chick needed to do earn her love was to need her. That showed that Oly was aware of her own weakness. Maybe she knew that Arty was manipulating her. Her love extended beyond familial. She was romantically in love with him as well, which was why she didn’t like that Iphy got along well with Arty.
Oly was a bit of a backseat observer for most of the past story line. The takeaway was her deep feelings of connections to Binewski and deformity.
In the present, Oly was reconnecting with Miranda, though as a friend. In secret, Oly was still protective of her as her mother. When she found out that Mary had approached Miranda to cut off her tail, Oly couldn’t have that. As a Binewski, she grew up and continued to believe that deformity made who she was, and that she must be proud of being deformed. I think she was secretly pleased that Miranda had come to appreciate her tail, since she was seen as sexually desired at the fetish club where she performed with her tail. And she couldn’t have Mary coming along and telling Miranda that she was better as a normie, because Miranda was a Binewski after all. So Oly concocted a plan to understand Mary’s motivations, and afterwards, kill Mary. Oly sort of succeeded but not in the way that she wanted. She wanted the death to be quick but it didn’t work out that way. It ended in both her death and Mary’s, but I still consider Oly having succeeded as she both killed Mary, and left her writings to Miranda that would hopefully convince her to be proud of who she was.
Fortunato ‘Chick’ Binewski
Chick was the youngest Binewski. Al and Lil had initially thought that he was a normal child, and thus they’d have to abandon him. Al was very careful about not leaving any clues so that they couldn’t be tracked. So he was very eager for Lil to abandon the baby at a specific time when there was no surveillance. Meanwhile, Lil was very reluctant to leave the baby. I think it might have been because they’d had a spate of ‘failed’ babies. In any case, as they left the baby, Chick had used his powers to move Lil back to him for feeding. As a baby, Chick already showed telekinesis.
As I mentioned earlier, Al would bring Chick to the casino to steal wallets. But it became clear to the family that Al enjoyed looking normal for once, which made them feel a bit abandoned, made them feel angry that he wanted out when he had created them. It was Arty who had hired some people to rough up Al and threaten to kidnap Chick. That scared Al enough that he would never do it again.
Chick, like Oly, yearned to be needed. As the youngest, he obviously chased after his older siblings. Arty hated Chick and so Chick did everything to try to earn his favour. As for Iphy and Elly, they were nicer with Chick. Oly was indifferent to Chick, because her top priority would always be Arty.
Chick naturally developed his powers more as he grew older. Once, he explained to Oly that his power involved allowing motion. He used the example of water in a tank. If a hole was made in the tank, water would naturally flow out. He just needed to create holes to let things go where they needed to go.
Arty assigned Chick to be Dr. Phyllis’ assistant. First he was the anaesthetist, as he could control a part of patients’ brains to suppress the pain. Later, he’d become the surgeon at a very young and illegal age.
Towards the end, Chick started to show a little more of his own feelings. He and Oly had their own friendship, as the two younger kids. Oly had asked Chick to impregnate her with Arty’s sperm. And Chick did it as a favour to Oly. As well, Chick said on a few occasions that he disproved of what Arty had done to the twins.
Chick didn’t have much closure either. He died in the fire.
Chick is someone like Oly, except we see how Oly could have turned worse if she had a power that Arty wanted to take advantage of.
Miranda Barker
Miranda was Oly’s daughter by Arty. Arty forced Oly to give Miranda away as a baby to a nunnery. Miranda grew up believing she was an orphan. When she grew older, she had access to a trust fund that allowed her to live in the building that Lil and Oly lived in. She was in school studying art and was great at drawing anatomy. She bonded with Oly because she always drew something a bit odd for a competition every year and that year she wanted to draw Oly. Miranda also worked as a stripper at the fetish club as she had a tail.
Miranda didn’t know that Oly was her mother, but she bonded with her as a friend over both having deformities. Miranda was a peppy and optimistic girl. She definitely would not have grown up that way if she’d lived with the Binewskis. Miranda had to do a bit of convincing to get Oly to agree to be her model, but Oly agreed. By all accounts, Miranda was just a normal girl who happened to be fascinated with the grotesque. And to Oly’s surprise, through stripping she had come to appreciate her own deformity.
Oly was upset that Miranda was considering cutting off her tail, and made it her mission to stop it. Miranda was considering it, because Mary was offering lots of money. She wanted to think she was indifferent to her tail. She was of course made fun of for having a tail, but she came to be ok with it through stripping. Would it make a difference if she had the tail or not? It would if she was a Binewski. That was what Oly thought.
Towards the end, I think Miranda could tell Oly was growing distant. Maybe it was because she was going ahead with the surgery. Maybe it was because Oly was busy with the planned assassination. She was trying to get Oly to react by telling her that she was doing the surgery for sure.
Considering that Mary died, I’m guessing Miranda never did do the surgery. The book ended with a letter from Oly to Miranda, telling her the truth of her family, and imploring her to understand. This will be Oly’s legacy, to understand that she is perfect the way she is, and that she is who she is because of her deformities. In a way, it’s a sweet way to end the novel, isn’t it?
Dr. Phyllis
Dr. Phyllis was the strange doctor who was hired to be the surgeon of the Arturan cult. In an old clipping, we were told that Dr. Phyllis had once conducted surgery on herself, believing that there was a device inside her. She got tired when she had to close herself back up and that’s when she called the ambulance. But the doctors noted that the surgical work was pretty good. It was also revealed that she had falsified her academic records in order to get into medical school. However, she was a good student.
Dr. Phyllis was a very cold and unpleasant woman. She just did her job of amputation and that was it. I think it was Oly who had approached Dr. Phyllis to ask something about babies (possibly the twins’ pregnancy) and Dr. Phyllis had noted that she was not trained on obstetrics and basically avoided answering anything and waved Oly off. Oly had noted that that was the most she’d spoken to Dr. Phyllis ever, an she was so unpleasant. Still, she did what Arty wanted.
Arty had Chick be Dr. Phyllis’ understudy until one day he could replace Dr. Phyllis with Chick as the cult surgeon. I believe she was killed and just delivered away from the cult grounds.
Vern Bogner/the Bag Man
Bogner was a man who had attempted murder on the Binewski children. He tried to shoot them when they were in public once when they were young. He didn’t make another appearance until years later, coming to the Arturan Cult to be a crony of Arty. It was a strange turn of events. We find out that his marriage and family life failed and he tried to shoot himself in the face. He failed to kill himself and ended up having to wear a bag over his head because of his deformities. Arty put him in charge of spying on the twins, and it was through the Bag Man that he found out about their sexual activities.
Arty ‘gave’ the twins to the Bag Man. The twins saw it as him prostituting them to him, but he saw it as marriage. All the while, Lil had a weird feeling about the Bag Man. It was when the Bag Man made sexual advances to the twins that she shot him, realizing that he was the attempted murderer all those years ago.
Mary Lick
Mary Lick was the daughter of a very rich man and thus had tons of money at her disposal. She had offered Miranda lots of money to get her tail cut off, so Oly investigated Mary and her motivations. Miranda had briefly said that Mary got a kick out of permanently changing people.
Oly befriended Mary, and she would take swimming lessons with Mary. As they grew closer, Mary would show Oly her collection of women. Mary explained that she felt women were most liberated when they were free of the features that made them attractive to men. Her first woman was someone who had been very pretty, but after she got into a terrible accident and was not so pretty anymore, she became an amazing scientist. That was Mary’s reasoning, though I think Oly wondered if Mary was just insecure about beautiful women.
In the end, that didn’t change what Oly needed to do. She needed to stop Mary from enabling Miranda’s surgery. So she concocted a plan to kill Mary. The plan didn’t quite work as Mary didn’t die immediately and was suffering. Mary had a gun in her locker and from police reports, they were both killed by gunshot.
Themes
Deformity
Right from the beginning, deformity was painted to be a good thing. Al and Lil said it was a gift for their children to be able to make money just from being freak shows from birth. It sounded romantic when they were saying it, but on thinking back, the logic is a bit flawed.
The Binewski family saw deformity as something to be proud of. The more shocking the deformity, the more highly regarded the were. That was why Chick was looked down upon. He looked too normal. It’s an interesting reversal of what many of us are used to.
And it’s most interesting seeing it how Oly sees the world when she integrates into society, living in a fixed location in an urban population. She still sees deformity as something to be proud of. She feels powerful because people look at her and feel nervous or afraid, wondering what had happened to her. She feels powerful because people are puzzled and shocked when Oly feels no fear at her own deformity. At the fetish club, they had an ‘audition’ show that was clearly just meant to humiliate people. A bunch of people were dragged on stage to strip, including Oly. But she outweirded them by stripping and dancing with no shame. That was her superpower.
As well, to Oly, her deformity was tied very much to being a proud Binewski. Every Binewski had to be proud of their deformities.
Family
The family politics were really intense. As I mentioned, I was shocked at how little of a role Al and Lil played in the family as soon as the children grew to their teen years. Remember, Arty was a teenager when he was already starting his group that eventually became a cult. In my opinion they were wilfully ignorant. They wanted to believe they were so smart and enlightened for their idea of family, but the truth was that they were not smart enough to keep the family in peace.
Arty was born to be a cult leader. Oly noted that one of the changes he made to his act was just to spew random fortune telling that was based on nothing. But somehow people believed him because he was different and therefore enlightened. For Arty, he just loved the attention. And he had Oly and Chick falling into his trap too. The issue was Iphy and Elly. And this conflict led to the climax of the past story line.
The Binewski family also lived in seclusion. There were other people who worked in the circus that weren’t part of the family, but they were always separate. And I think it was this isolation that led to the incestuous thoughts. The only person who ever knew what a normal family was like was Lil. She was the only one ever trying to enforce normal family relationships. Al’s father had owned the circus before him, so I doubt either of them had a concept of normal family relationships either. So for the kids, they mix all their feelings together and don’t interpret them the same way that most other people do.
Cult
The Arturan Cult is honestly terrifying to me. A cult of people who aspire to be amputated? Horrifying. Oly was just at the edge of it and the teachings of the cult were never relevant to her because she was a Binewski.
Arty had rules on who could be allowed into the cult. I remember it was basically children and people who were mentally infirm who were not allowed into the cult. But everyone else was game and they also had to bring a cult fee with them. Whenever the circus travelled, the cult would have to follow along at their own expense. It was clearly also a cash grab, but we know Arty got off on being able to manipulate these people to get amputated. I’m afraid that if I knew any more about the cult that the book would actually be too scary for me
Overall
An interesting read. Not for everyone, but I truly appreciated that it leaned in to the premise and really explored the messed up family borne out of messed up principles an ethos.