Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

What it's about (from Goodreads): The story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out–with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes–to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious–and dangerous–asset.
As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

What I learned: This book is more than a little disturbing. There are drugs, incest, rapes, amputations, lobotomies, murders and all-out unhealthy relationships of all kinds. It's not a long book but it took me much longer than usual to get through because it's so dense, both physically (the type is smaller than most books and single-spaced) and content-wise. There is so much happening that it's sometimes hard to tell what the main plotline is.
I consider myself (as I'm sure many people do) quite normal and average. I'm of average height, weight, attractiveness and personableness. I'm pretty well-accepted in the world for who I am and I've never really felt uncomfortable with myself. To the characters in this book, I would be ignored and despised for being a "norm". Normal people from across the country desire abnormalities and get them in gruesome ways. It's so hard for me to imagine wanting to mutilate myself so that I could be set apart as not normal but this book almost accomplishes that. None of the Binewskis are at all self-conscious about their specialties, which include having flippers in place of arms and legs, being an albino hunch-backed dwarf and being a Siamese twin. Instead, they scoff at normal people and when it looks like a member of their own family might be normal, they almost get rid of him. I learned that not everyone who is different sees it as negative. I know that this book takes physical abnormalities to an extreme but I do think that it applies to people in general as well. This book made me think about the desire to be unique and the desire to be the same and how they are linked. If you are perfectly normal in every way, would you consider undergoing surgery to be given uniqueness? If you have something about yourself that is considered unusual, might you undergo surgery to be given normality? Geek Love made me think about how I feel about myself and define my self-worth as well as other people's.

If you've read Geek Love, what did you learn? Were you as creeped out by some parts of it as I was?