63 pages • 2 hours read
Katherine DunnGeek Love
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Fabulon
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes depictions of incest, body horror, abuse, ableism, suicide, and assault.
The Fabulon represents the fantastic, the weird, and the otherworldly to the norms who patronize it. The freaks they see and excitement they experience on the midway are a welcome distraction from the monotony of their daily lives. Arty says that the carnival is based on hope. Norms flock to the carnival hoping to win a prize, to see something extraordinary, to meet someone new. Arty says that people call that luck or chance, but at its base it is hope. Hope needs risk in order to work and its power is proportional to how big the risk is if what you hope for doesn’t come to pass. Arty taps into that desperate need for hope by promoting Arturism and offering hope for fulfillment and meaning in life, with great risk attached. The Fabulon, then, is the representation of risk, danger, and hope.
For Oly and her family, the Fabulon symbolizes safety, security, and their place in the world. The carnival is their home and they exist in constant motion, never rooted to one place. Often, the family members can’t even remember what town they are parked near, because they all look the same to them, as do the norms that populate these towns. Only the carnival is real, always moving but always surrounding them.
Miranda’s Tail
Oly cannot let Miss Lick have Miranda’s tail removed because of all that the tail represents: Miranda’s ties to the Binewskis and her family legacy. By the standards of the Binewskis, Miranda’s tail is not much of a “specialty,” but it’s still weighed down with great meaning for Oly. If Miranda was to lose her tail, she would be indistinguishable from a norm, and that would put her outside the circle of what the Binewskis stand for, in Oly’s mind. Miranda herself comes to instinctively feel that her tail is worth keeping, once she starts showing it off at the Glass House Club. Miranda does not understand why she’s hesitating to let Miss Lick pay her to have it removed, but something inside her gives her pause. Oly thinks this is a genetic attachment to the family Miranda never knew.
Mumpo
The baby Mumpo is born at a whopping twenty-six pounds, five ounces. He is constantly famished, exhausting Iphy with his constant need to nurse, so Iphy has him nurse from Elly as well. Mumpo represents the monstrous, ugly desires of the Binewskis, as well as those of his father, the Bag Man. Mumpo is a bottomless pit of id—unquenchable desire in human form. Even when he is a newborn, Oly and Arty sense there is something hateful about Mumpo, though Oly feels guilty for thinking such thoughts about a baby. Lil tells Oly privately that there’s something about the baby she doesn’t like. Lil calls him greedy, a word that Elly utters herself. Elly knows that Mumpo must be stopped from literally sucking the life out of Iphy and herself, and she fears Mumbo will take Iphy away from her, so as soon as she is able to, Elly kills him.
