Friday's Forgotten Book: Freaks' Amour

Detroit's own Patti Abbott recently started Friday's Forgotten Book, a boon to readers -- and content-stumped bloggers -- everywhere.

Thanks, Patti.





Tom de Haven's Freaks' Amour: Twenty-some years ago, someone loaned me their copy, I read it in two sittings, then looked for a copy in every used bookstore I set foot in, for many years, never finding one.

Then I went to work in a bookstore, and anyone I described the novel to said, angrily: "Oh, that sounds just like Geek Love," which was inevitably their favorite book of all time. (Apart from the title, they sound nothing alike.)

Consequently I stopped talking or thinking about Freaks' Amour, even neglecting to look for it when ABE arrived on the scene.

Here is what I remember: The book is a first novel, published in 1979. The male narrator has a twin brother; they were conceived on their parents' wedding night, during a nuclear incident in New Jersey. The boys, and eventually most of their generation, have been born deformed due to the fallout.

[1979 was, of course, the year of the Three Mile Island incident. Did that hurt the book's chances for finding readers? (It didn't hurt the box office of The China Syndrome.)]

The freaks and the normals live in a segregated society. The narrator yearns to be Normal; his twin brother is a leader of an underground Freak movement pushing for a revolution. Intrigue ensues.

And then there's the goldfish eggs.

And the live sex shows.

Tom de Haven went on to write the 'Derby Dugan' books, among others. I've picked up his stuff, but nothing has ever really grabbed me the way Freaks' Amour did. He spoke a bit about the genesis of the book in an online interview of recent vintage:

After getting my master’s degree in 1973, I went to work in New York City as an editor for a number of men’s magazines (Sir!, Mr. and Man to Man) owned by Adrien Lopez, father of naturalist/novelist Barry Lopez. This was that deliciously cockeyed era when “porn” briefly had a lot of cachet (the era of Deep Throat, Devil in Miss Jones, etc.) and I was assigned to write articles about “the industry.” I met most of the directors and “stars” of X-rated films and from that experience (weirdly enough) sprang my first novel, Freaks’ Amour, a fantasy about a group of mutants living in Jersey City, two of whom make their living by performing live sex shows for “normal” people.

That book, published in 1979, enjoyed a fairly long life as a “cult novel,” to the extent that as late as the early 1990s it was regularly optioned for a film. (The last time it was, it was optioned by Alex Proyas, director of The Crow, Dark City and I, Robot, and I spent two years working with him on a screenplay, which of course was never produced.)

There are copies available on ABE, if your local library doesn't have one, and if you are curious. I'm going to look for a copy right now, to see if it's as endlessly inventive as I remember it to be, and you should find out for yourself.

Unless you're one of those Geek-Love-won't-listen-to-reason types...