These Beautiful Freaks Die in the 1969 Hong Kong Flu Pandemic. You Will Wish They Hadn't."This novel has everything: a coming of age story, a family drama, and a thriller, all in one splendid read!" Kirkus
Buddy Hartman was adopted by a woman who wanted to get a child to please her husband. When the husband leaves, the woman becomes a prostitute to support herself, and then becomes an addict to soothe the pain. Buddy learns early that life teaches you to be selfish.
However, it's Buddy's own drug abuse later in life that leads him to Barry, who saves him from a life of addiction. At 31, Buddy is a sober and clean music promoter in Minneapolis, and he writes mysteries on the side, but he is incomplete. He wants to know who his biological mother is.
The State of Minnesota informs him that his mother is still alive, living in Charlotte, North Carolina. However, she is a freak who is 1/2 of the famous Hilton Twins, Siamese sisters who were famous vaudevillians in the 1920s and '30s, but who are now living in poverty and working at a Park 'n Shop grocery.
Buddy's life is changed forever when he takes his mother and aunt to the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention in an attempt to resurrect their entertainment careers and find out his own identity. Buddy learns what being a freak really means, as the power of the State meets the power of the counterculture heroes.
But this is the late '60s, and heroes are falling all around him, as Buddy reaches out for a father, finding a substitute in a black Civil Rights leader and a famous Yippie. But his real father, when Buddy meets him, is the biggest surprise of all.
As Dundee International Fiction Prize Winner for 2012, Jacob M. Appel, puts it, Freak Story is "Part zany alternate history of the late 1960s, part moving drama of family and personal growth, Freak Story creates a unique and thoroughly engrossing universe all its own."
