With daring realism and stunning imagination, the author of Geek Love, Katherine Dunn, takes us on a journey into the mind of a feisty, adventurous adolescent named Jean "Dutch" Gillis. Dutch goes "trucking" from Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles on a quest in search of herself, which, like the river trek of Deliverance, is filled with chilling discoveries and sudden violence.

With boyish-looking Dutch is her friend Heydorf, a shadowy character who has his own secrets to hide. With her, too, is the confusion and volatile feelings of youth, when sex is a mystery waiting to be understood...and...

A story which mixes tenderness, terror, suspense and dark comedy. It is told by Olympia Binewski, a bald albino hunchback dwarf and members of the American carnival family. Al and Lil, proprietors of Binewski's Fabulon, hit upon the idea of breeding their own freak show.

Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world. She spends her days alone at home, reading drugstore mysteries, polishing the doorknobs, waxing the floors. Her only companions are a vase of goldfish, a garden toad, and the door-to-door salesman who sells her cleaning supplies once a month. She broods over her deepest regrets: her blighted romances with self-important men, her lifelong struggle to feel at home in her own body, and her wayward early twenties, when she was a fish out of water among a group of eccentric, privileged young people at a liberal arts college. There was Sam, an unabashed...