Geek Love by Katherine Dunn I wasn’t aware of this novel until the author died, which was recently. Neil Gaiman and a few other writers used this as their parting memory–a particularly influential book (Kurt Cobain cited it as an influence). I looked it up and found the summary intriguing — a married couple engineers their children to be circus freaks for their literal “Family Circus“. It sounded horrific and darkly bizarre, like all those dark carnival/clown tropes I love. The accolades are not dismissible. Whereas a book like “Stranger in a Strangeland” is tainted by anachronisms (like the hippie counter-culture and there being actual life on Mars), this one…