Katherine Dunn’s Dark Carnival of Desire

When Katherine Dunn’s novel “Geek Love” became Sonny Mehta’s first purchase as editor-in-chief at Knopf, she became famous in the literary world, at the age of forty-three, after years of obscurity. The book is about what happens after the circus impresario Aloysius Binewski feeds “cocaine, amphetamines, and arsenic” to his repeatedly pregnant wife, a retired geek named Crystal Lil, to genetically engineer a family of circus freaks. “Geek Love” is historically beloved by dark and eccentric artists, many of whom are famous.