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If Flannery O'Connor had consumed vast quantities of LSD, she might have written like this. - LITERARY REVIEW Riveting and extremely well-crafted. There's a real philosophy behind it where it actually touches on the profound. - MARGARET FORSTER The most romantic novel about love and family I have read. It made me ashamed to be so utterly normal I felt electrocuted when I read that first page with Crystal Lil and her freak brood. I stood there in the bookstore and my jaw came unhinged. No book I've read, before or since, has given me that specific jolt

Like a collaboration between John Irving and David Lynch, this audaciously conceived, sometimes shocking tale of love and hubris in a carnival family exerts the same mesmeric fascination as the freaks it depicts, despite essential structural flaws. In language as original and fantastic as her story, Dunn (Attic, 1970; Truck, 1971) tells the tale of Binewski's Carnival Fabulon, an unremarkable traveling show until patriarch Aloysius decides to breed his own freaks. Using drugs, insecticides and radioactivity, Al and his wife Crystal Lil, sometime geek, produce Arturo, a thalidomide child; Elly and Iphy, beautiful Siamese twins; Olympia, the novel's narrator, an albino hunchbacked dwarf trained as a barker; and the outwardly normal but telekinetic Chick. With overtones of classical tragedy, Olympia relates Arturo's growing power: first over his sisters, who vie for his love, then over the entire show, and finally over the many followers of the cult of Arturism, who, like their prophet, have pieces of themselves amputated to transcend appearance. (Arms and legs become lion food; hands and feet, fodder for transcendental maggots, ironic souveniors of Arturo.) Arturo's pride and jealousy combine with the arrival of a failed assassin, now a freak himself, and with the twins' sideline of selling norms unique sex, to bring the show to a flaming end. Although the framing story - years later, Olympia schemes to save Miranda, her daughter by Arturo, from a perverse philanthropist - is poorly integrated, and the novel sometimes judders along, this is captivatingly original stuff. With wit and poetry, Dunn rede-fines the limits of the acceptable. (Kirkus Reviews)

If Flannery O'Connor has consumed vast quantities of LSD, she might have written like this. LITERARY REVIEW A book of bizarre and brutal beauty, guaranteed to wring from you horror and heartbreak by turns... COMPANY Riveting and extremely well-crafted. There's a real philosophy behind it where it actually touches on the profound. MARGARET FORSTER A novel that everyone will be talking about, a brilliant, suspenseful, heartbreaking tour de force. PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

'If Flannery O'Connor has consumed vast quantities of LSD, she might have written like this.' LITERARY REVIEW 'A book of bizarre and brutal beauty, guaranteed to wring from you horror and heartbreak by turns...' COMPANY 'Riveting and extremely well-crafted. There's a real philosophy behind it where it actually touches on the profound.' MARGARET FORSTER 'A novel that everyone will be talking about, a brilliant, suspenseful, heartbreaking tour de force.' PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY 'So monumentally tasteless that it ought to have a sick bag incorporated into its jacket design. It is also hilarious, vital and original... mesmerising, chilling and curiously uplifting- the brilliant production of a brilliant imagination.' STANDARD

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Katherine Dunn was a journalist, an advice columnist, and a boxing correspondent for the Associated Press. She died in 2016.

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