It revolves around a married couple who own a traveling carnival and breed mutant children as sideshow freaks, both to attract paying customers and to endow their offspring with “the inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves.” “Geek Love” was curiously original and imaginative, though some called it bizarre. She died on Wednesday in Portland at 70, leaving another novel unfinished. It was her third novel, after “Attic” in 1970 and “Truck” in 1971, and the last she would publish. “Geek Love,” published nearly a decade later, went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies and become a National Book Award finalist in 1989. Which got me thinking about freaks and mutations that were not considered desirable. “It would be more interesting to go in another direction entirely, to search for something other than the perceived symmetrical, common notion of perfection. “I thought that was actually kind of boring, that search for perfection,” she told Caitlin Roper of Wired magazine in 2014. She wound up dismissing the thought, however, deciding that flaws were more fascinating than perfection. Dunn wondered, What if she could have bred a more obedient boy? Inspired by the diverse blooms there, Ms. Katherine Dunn began writing the comic novel “Geek Love” in the late 1970s after her young son refused to join her on a stroll through the famous hybrid rose garden in Portland, Ore.
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