Lick is a wealthy woman who pays attractive women to get disfiguring operations, ostensibly so they may live up to their potential instead of becoming sex objects it is implied, however, that Lick's real motivation is to punish them for being more attractive than she is. There she meets Mary Lick, who tries to convince her to have the tail cut off. (The rooming house is run by 'Crystal' Lil, who is so addled that she doesn't know Oly is her daughter.) Miranda has a special defect of her own, a small tail, which she flaunts at a local fetish strip club. Oly lives in the same rooming house as Miranda so she can 'spy' on her. This had been urged by her brother Arty, who was also Miranda's father (not through sexual intercourse, but by the telekinetic powers of Chick, who carried Arty's sperm directly to Oly's ovum). She lives on a trust fund created by Oly before she gave up her daughter to be raised by nuns. Nineteen-year-old Miranda does not know Oly is her mother. The second story is set in the present and is centered on Oly's daughter, Miranda.

As Arty battles his siblings to maintain control over his followers, competition between their respective freak shows slowly begins to take over their lives. Each member moves up in stages, losing increasingly significant chunks of their body, starting with their toes and fingers. In this cult, Arty persuades people to have their limbs amputated (so that they can be like him) in their search for the principle he calls PIP ('Peace, Isolation, Purity'). They especially have to deal with the Machiavellian Arty as he develops his own cult: Arturism.

The novel takes place in two interwoven time periods: the first deals with the Binewski children's constant struggle against each other through life. The results are Arturo ('Arty,' also known as 'Aqua Boy'), a boy with flippers for hands and feet Electra ('Elly') and Iphigenia ('Iphy'), Siamese twins Olympia ('Oly'), a hunchbacked albino dwarf and Fortunato ('Chick'), the normal-looking baby of the family who has telekinetic powers. 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. The novel is the story of a traveling carnival run by Aloysius 'Al' Binewski and his wife 'Crystal' Lil, and their children, seen through the eyes of their daughter Olympia ('Oly') who writes the family history for her daughter Miranda. It was a finalist for the National Book Award. Dunn published parts of the novel in Mississippi Mud Book of Days (1983) and Looking Glass Bookstore Review (1988). Knopf (a division of Random House) in 1989. Geek Love is a novel by American writer Katherine Dunn, published completely by Alfred A.

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