Geek Love

“The old man had wandered with the show for so long that his dust would have been miserable left behind in some stationary vault.” 

This is a reference to Grandpa Binewski, whose cremated ashes are bolted to the generator truck. Oly is demonstrating that her family needs to travel with the carnival, even in death.

“They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.” 

At the striptease audition at the Glass House Club, Oly is pulled on stage and urged to take off her clothes. She does so not with shame, as the crowd expects, but instead with pride, showing off her deformities. She will not be made to feel like she is less because of her differences. By making the crowd unable to look away, she has won the encounter.

“A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soft, rained-out afternoon midway always hits my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of the lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.”

This passage conveys Oly’s love for the Fabulon. It is most alive at night, when the lights are on, customers fill the midway, and everything feels magical, but Oly loves it even on a day when the rain has forced the carnival to be canceled. This description also shows Dunn’s poetic style of writing.