"'When your mama was a geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins...'"

"'... such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. ‘Spread your lips, sweet Lil,’ they’d cluck, ‘and show us your choppers!’"

Goodbye to Katherine Dunn, the author of "Geek Love." What a novel! Above is the first line. I used to teach it in a seminar I did, long ago, titled "Women in Law and Literature." Each week we would read a literary work and a legal case. We read "Geek Love" the week we read a case about women who were prosecuted for using drugs while pregnant. In the book, the mother tries to produce children with extreme birth defects, so they'll be able to work in the family geek business. The women in the legal cases were just drug addicts, failing to muster the will to protect the child within. (Yes, she had a right to abortion, but she didn't exercise it, and she was generating a real human being and, perhaps, imposing burdens on him (and on us the People)). The woman in the novel was deliberately making badly disabled children. Much more happens in that novel, by the way. A craze develops for surgically transforming oneself into a "geek."

According to the linked Slate article (by Dan Kois), Dunn delivered a second novel to her publisher, who'd paid her $175,000 for the rights....

That was in 1989, and the book’s never been published. A wondrous excerpt appeared in the Paris Review six years ago, and I harbor hope that Dunn’s husband and son will, once their grief has lessened, consider revealing that long-gestating work to the world. No matter how unshapely or ungainly it may be, I know I’ll love it.

Here's the cover that's on my paperback copy of the book.



Kois talks of another original — "the cover [Chip] Kidd designed launched his career" — which you can see displayed at the link. It's just the title written in a font that's close to the old computer display fonts of the time. It's as if the author knew absolutely nothing about the book and just assumed the relevant geeks were those people who are really into computers.

Imagine all the ridiculous book covers we could have it the designer just ran with their own thought based on words in the title....



AND: Here's that book excerpt in The Paris Review:

Tweezer Painton was a burly ten-year-old with a glower built into his square mug. His name came from his hobby of grabbing individual hairs on his victims’ heads and yanking them out for fun. Mostly he did it with his thick, grubby fingers but sometimes he used tweezers stolen from his mother’s bathroom cabinet.

Whoever sat in front of him in class developed a reflexive shudder around the nape of the neck. On the playground he would throw another kid down, straddle their arms so they couldn’t fight back, and hold their screeching faces with one hand while he tweezed away at their eyebrows or head hair....

Where does that go that was too horrible for the people who sprang for "Geek Love"? [UPDATE: I'm unclear from Kois's text whether a full manuscript was ever delivered to the publisher or whether Dunn received the money.]

ALSO: "GEEK LOVE AT 25: HOW A FREAK FAMILY INSPIRED YOUR POP CULTURE HEROES."