Freaks: What a compendium! It is almost an encyclopedia. Fiedler admits that research assistants helped him gather this mountain of anecdote, fact, rumor, hearsay, literary allusion, and superstition, and I can well believe it. Producing the book was a task beyond one man's industry. Freaks looks at everything, in every direction: into the mythic past, which supplies us with the monsters and dwarfs and giants of our childhood psychic terrors; into history; and into literature….

[One] of the advantages of reading Fiedler's compilation is the opportunity to acquire some pretty exotic language. The study of Freaks is called teratology—freaks themselves are terata. As you read through the book (and it is hard to imagine anyone not following Fiedler's trail through the horror-laden chapters), you will pick up such words as achondroplastics (dwarfs), ateliotics (incomplete persons), and epignathic parasites (parts of human beings growing out of whole bodies)….

[Though] the narrative and the illustrations are provocative, I found myself wondering as I read: What is it all for? What's the point?

The answer is suggested by the book's subtitle: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. Fiedler explores "the supernatural terror," the awe, and the natural sympathy that the sight of human monstrosities inspires in us. We look at them in carnivals, and we are reassured that our secret fears of our own freakishness are unfounded: "'We are the Freaks,' the human oddities are supposed to reassure us from their lofty perches. 'Not you. Not you!'"

Fiedler confesses to the same vertigo we experience in the presence of freaks: "In joined twins the confusion of self and other, substance and shadow, ego and other, is more terrifyingly confounded than it is when the child first perceives face-to-face in the mirror an image moving as he moves, though clearly in another world." These observations on the psychology of freaks and freakishness are among the most valuable comments in this volume, and we concur with Fiedler when he says, "The distinction between audience and exhibit, we and them, normal and Freak, is revealed as an illusion … defended, but untenable in the end."

Leslie Fiedler has always been an iconoclastic critic, writing about subjects no one else has even considered. In this new work he interests the reader consistently and falters noticeably only once: He leaves out of his literary survey the novelist Harry Crews, who has written two superb novels about freaks…. Readers will think, doubtless, of other omissions, but that will in no way diminish Fiedler's (and his researchers') achievement. In every way it's an absorbing book. (p. 54)