BOOK 165: GEEK LOVE: KATHERINE DUNN

Geek Love is a novel by Katherine Dunn, published completely by Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House) in 1989. Dunn published parts of the novel in Mississippi Mud Book of Days (1983) and Looking Glass Bookstore Review (1988). It was a finalist for the National Book Award.

MY VERDICT: I really wanted to tell you more about this book but at the same time I want to keep everything as a surprise. I didn’t want to add any more synopsis to spoil the things I had to much joy in discovering.

This book is written from the perspective of an albino, hunchbacked dwarf, in two different periods. We follow her as an older woman living in a shared house and are told the story of her past and introduced to her family. The family includes a mother and father who experiment to create unique children.  Oly, our small narrator, shares her life with Siamese-twin, piano playing sisters, a brother with fin-like arms and a talent for showmanship and a ‘norm’ younger brother. They travel with their own carnival followed by other interesting characters including a big-cat trainer, a fly cowboy, sword swallowers, amputees and numerous redheads.

  

Film 800: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Trivia: A special-effects sequence that took place at the beginning of the film was cut shortly before the movie hit the theaters. In this sequence, the carnival materializes from the smoke of the train - the smoke from the engine "becomes ropes and canvas tents. Tree limbs grow together to form a ferris wheel and a spider web mutates into a wheel of fortune." This sequence was the first time that computer animation was used to animate organic material, and it was combined with traditional animation. The scene was deemed not convincing enough and was cut from the film at the very last minute (according to an issue of "Twilight Zone Magazine" that was released the same month as the film, the scene was going to be in the final print). 

Steven Spielberg was considered to direct this movie. 

"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes" is from "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare, Scene IV, Act i, spoken by the second witch. 

Stephen King wrote a rejected adaptation. 

Sam Peckinpah briefly flirted with the idea of filming Ray Bradbury's story but was unable to raise the necessary finance. 

Ray Bradbury first wrote 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' as a screenplay in 1952, after watching Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain, which Bradbury thought the greatest musical ever made. Bradbury showed Kelly the screenplay, and Kelly was so impressed that he wanted to make it his next picture. When Kelly shopped the story around to potential backers, however, he was unable to raise any money for the project. It was only after this failure that Bradbury rewrote the story as a novel, which was published in 1962. Bradbury dedicated the novel to Kelly.