When Katherine Dunn died in 2016, I felt sad and cheated. I grieved over the loss of a unique voice in American literature and accepted that GEEK LOVE would be the last novel of hers that I would ever read. However, as everything else has gone in 2022, SURPRISE!

For almost 50 years, Dunn’s manuscript for her unpublished book resided among other papers as part of an archive at Lewis & Clark College. This was through a bequest arranged by Dunn before her untimely death. Thanks to a 2019 find by editor Naomi Huffman, who was granted access to the archive, TOAD has now become a fanciful addition to Dunn’s published works. In an editor’s note, Huffman states that she had a sense of “frustrated incredulity” that no one else had thought to do the same.

"Katherine Dunn was a truly creative, innovative and inspirational author. TOAD speaks to these qualities and more. Descriptive, disgusting, heartwarming and enraging, this book will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page."

And so Dunn’s allegiance to the fringe, to the outsiders, in all their color and ragged glory continues. A thinly veiled attempt at recounting her days as a hippie intellectual at Reed College and the ramshackle and eccentric life she lived afterwards, Dunn gives her faithful readers (and hopefully some new ones as well) a sharp, pointy stick of a read about growing old, the pain of past follies as a young woman, and the rage and isolation that can change perspectives in the sometimes swampy land of middle age.

Sally Gunnar is an erstwhile drifting co-ed who enrolls at the local “prestigious” college in Portland (Reed, of course). She soon finds herself befriending a chemistry genius who has decided to live attached to his guitar, in an apartment filled with people, horse meat dinners and plenty of cats. It isn’t long before this wandering nut changes his name from Sam to Omar and falls in love with Carlotta, a perfect hippie girl with shiny toes, clean feet and the long stick-straight hair of American classic beauties. Sally becomes the third wheel to this passionate and strange couple.

As they grow into semi-functioning adults, Sally is there for the ride. Until she isn’t. And then Dunn gives us her epilogue, filled with regrets, restraints and rage. Sally is every interesting woman going through middle age, fists raised and emotional defenses down. But at no point can you call her a loser.

Dunn loves to mire in the smells, feels and tastes of things that are both beyond their prime and a source of desperate nutrition. Sally is her Statue of Liberty, once she has tired of the huddled masses. The story that Sally tells as she ages, as she looks back and realizes that she was better than what she allowed herself to have, is quite the tale, especially when you consider that this novel was written in the ’70s when Dunn was living the life of a young adult Sally, not the aging matriarch she eventually would become.

Dunn's ability to pierce through the ravages of age while also perfectly relaying the foibles and craziness of young adulthood and identity seeking is a joy to read. Readers are pulled through the narrative like Sally; we are not always comfortable with where we are, but we are quite anxious nonetheless to see how it all works out.

Katherine Dunn was a truly creative, innovative and inspirational author. TOAD speaks to these qualities and more. Descriptive, disgusting, heartwarming and enraging, this book will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.