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...