Geek Love: Zack Handlen's comments
I’d heard of this one before Donna suggested it—a few of my friends in college were big fans—but all I knew was the title. I just assumed it was some cutesy rom-com about nerds; maybe they bonded over cosplay and LARPing, something like that. So whatever else, I’ll give Geek Love that much. Couple of pages in, and I had no idea what was going on, except that this definitely wasn’t a rom-com, and the only cosplay I could expect to see would probably take years of therapy to forget.
Since Donna opened with some positive, I’ll follow her lead. There’s a lot to like here. Once the story gets going (I’d say right around the time Chick is born), Dunn had my attention. The occasional bits of foreshadowing, like the sections set in the present that let us know that the family outside of Oly and Lil are all dead, and Oly’s occasional troubled commentary, create a constant sense of tension; you know that everything’s going to go rotten eventually, but you’re not exactly sure when, and that makes for good reading.
Plus, the nastiness of the regular interactions between the main freaks (generally Arty inspired or created) combined with their basic connection to each other—well, it’s a great dynamic, isn’t it? People who love each other so intensely that they’re willing to do anything to control that relationship, and what makes them dangerous is that there’s no restrictions on “anything.” The benefit in freakdom, the thing that Arturism hinges on, is that being ostracized from normal society means freedom from any imposed standards of behavior. The more freakish you are, the less is expected of you, and that means you can do whatever you feel needs to be done without fear of judgment. After all, who’s gonna judge someone whose more a thing than a person?
Dunn gets a lot of play out of that freedom, but one of the novel’s flaws is that she lets her ambitions get the better of her, doing too much with too many characters for them all to get their due. Oly is a terrific lead, and Arty is also strong, but the further away from those two you move, the more indistinct things become. I had a good sense of the twins and Chick, but I wasn’t satisfied with the time we spent with them, especially Chick. His transformation from self-loathing healer to mutilating surgeon to weapon of mass destruction was way too sketchy. The stuff we got about Iphy and Elly wasn’t a lot better. I liked the often oblique nature of the novel’s violence, but sometimes that obliqueness meant missing bits that should’ve held things together.