Katherine Dunn. Near Flesh. MCD/FSG, 2025.
When Katherine Dunn published “Rhonda Discovers Art” in the Summer 2010 issue of the Paris Review, the news was notable enough for a write-up in the New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog. Dunn had published next to no fiction since Geek Love in 1989. The novel—which concerns a family of circus performers who cultivate deformities in their children for the sake of their freak show, and their flipper-limbed child who starts an amputation cult—was Sonny Mehta’s first acquisition after becoming the editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf. It was something of a coup for Dunn, whose first two novels, Attic and Truck, had been published to little fanfare by Harper & Row in the early 1970s. By the late 1980s, if people knew her work at all, it was as a journalist: she wrote for The Oregonian and The Willamette Week, local papers in her adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon. She had an advice column, covered boxing matches, and reviewed books. (Her archives, held at Lewis & Clark College, contain a letter from Stephen King thanking her for a kind review of Cujo.) Dunn was quite possibly the last writer anyone would have expected to resurface, after nearly two decades of silence, with the 1989 bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award. Continuously in print since its publication, Geek Love quickly graduated from “breakout hit” to bona fide cult classic in the vein of A Confederacy of Dunces, The Catcher in the Rye, or (god help us) Fight Club, which she was famous enough to be asked to blurb when it was published in 1996. By this point Dunn was writing for Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue. A follow-up novel—The Cut Man, a serial killer story set in the boxing world—was sold on spec but never delivered.
“Rhonda Discovers Art” is one of two excerpts from The Cut Man that appears in Near Flesh, a collection, published last October, of eighteen stories gathering nearly all Dunn’s extant work, both a de facto Collected Stories as well as the presumptive final entry in her catalogue, since her death in 2016, at age 70, from lung cancer. Most of the stories were written, though few published, in the ’70s and ’80s. They feature all the hallmarks of Dunn’s oeuvre: the body as site of both fascination and repulsion; a natural sympathy with misanthropes and the marginalized; dark comedy and outrageous violence; an openness to genres such as sci-fi, horror, and magical realism; and an attitude toward romance that anticipates what we’ve lately taken to calling heteropessimism.
Near Flesh, and a posthumous novel, Toad, published in 2022, owe their existence to the advocative, archival, and editorial work of Naomi Huffman, formerly of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, now co-running her own press, Hagfish Books. Huffman, like a lot of people, had a formative encounter with Geek Love when she was young. After re-reading the novel as an adult (and as a publishing professional) in the late 2010s, she wondered what else of Dunn’s was out there. Or might still be put out there. She visited Dunn’s archives and met Dunn’s son, Eli Dapolonia, who showed her the manuscript for Toad. (Dapolonia also has a complete draft of The Cut Man but says that Dunn considered it unfinished and unpublishable. Huffman has never been allowed to see it.) The stories in Near Flesh take a lighter touch than her novels, particularly the early ones, which have a distinctly post-Beat aesthetic if not quite sensibility: Kerouac’s lush language minus his spiritual seeking; Burroughs’s grim grotesquerie minus the formal experiments, heroin, and endless gouts of sperm. Near Flesh sheds welcome new light on Dunn’s work and working methods, but the book’s greatest value may be to remind us that she wasn’t a one-book wonder—that an oeuvre does, in fact, exist.
Dunn was born in Garden City, Kansas in 1945. Her childhood was chaotic. Her mother, a frustrated artist with mental health issues, was delusional and abusive; her father left before her second birthday and her mother soon remarried. The family was poor. They drifted west, sometimes working as tenant farmers, before settling in Tigard, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, when Dunn was 12 years old. The family kept chickens, and it often fell to Dunn to kill them. “The Education of Mrs. R.,” a story in the new collection, draws directly on Dunn’s experience with this grisly chore. When Mrs. R. realizes that the dozens of laying hens she’s purchased are actually all roosters, she spends an entire day beheading and plucking them, her efficiency and enthusiasm growing with each fall of the axe. Mrs. R’s daughter is so traumatized by a glimpse of this carnage that she hides under her bed and cries, sending Mrs. R.’s husband into a fury, but Mrs. R. is unmoved by her family’s horror. “A faint shade of pink seemed to have been thrown over her during the day. As she looked close she saw millions of tiny drops of blood stuck to the hairs of her arms and the nap of her garments. The feathers hung everywhere, the small, soft, spineless feathers. She stripped off her gloves and threw them into the sink. She stretched her clean, soft hands beneath the white light and smiled, admiring their strength.” At the risk of both armchair psychology and biographical fallacy, the story seems to be a doubled self-portrait; Dunn is both the child horrified by the brutality and the woman darkly smitten with the discovery of what she’s capable of.
Dunn left home at 17 and supported herself through all manner of working-class labor: she waited tables, danced topless, painted houses, sold magazine subscriptions. She became obsessed with Reed College and started sneaking into their cafeteria and dorms. I guess someone noticed, because in 1965 she was offered a full scholarship to the school, but the reality of academic life didn’t match the fantasy and she dropped out in 1967. She hit Haight-Ashbury the winter after the Summer of Love, met a guy, traveled Europe, had a son. After publishing her first novel, Attic, in 1970, Dunn got a job in New York City writing scripts for Warner Brothers, though it’s unclear whether any of her work was produced. She broke up with her son’s father and by 1976 was back in Portland, a single mother living close to the bone, once again waiting tables and tending bar.
Attic takes place almost entirely in the group holding cell of a city jail in Independence, Missouri. When we first meet K., the narrator, she has just been caught trying to pass a bad check, passed to her by a man to whom she sold fake magazine subscriptions. K. attempts to slip out of her jam by summoning her sex appeal, which she regards as an entity separate from herself, perhaps an Ariel-like spirit familiar, who she calls “Dogsbody.” (At one point she says that Dogsbody’s “Christian name” is “Puberty.”) As in her stories, the writing is strange, sleazy, sensuous, and a bit scrambled. “If Dogsbody were in shape she’d rub her titties on his arm and roll her eyes and get us to a john pretty quick. If I could slip out of her she’d get a better rest. It’s like being a Siamese twin joined at the crotch and trying to recover from pneumonia while your other half does the Watusi. Getting all those people to buy magazines the last few months probably wore her out.” In any case, Dogsbody can’t help her here, so K. spends the weekend in jail, shifting between an account of her immediate circumstances—her cellmates’ stories, her lost glasses, her fear of eventually having to take a shit in front of other people—and a feverish reverie of bad memories of childhood:
The tank is warm—the pillow on my bunk is thick and white—sheets, a blanket—a pencil—4 cell is all right—you don’t have to be sociable and chatter all the time—you can’t—but then usually I don’t want to anyway.
We are so afraid of eating each other. Sharks do—wolves do—it is irresistible—there are no vegetarian summer camps in the sea—the messiah leads his enclave of rusted adolescents to the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais where the consume carrot cookies and high protein vegetable patties with pure cane sugar cubes waiting for the end of the world and casting each other’s horoscopes—in the winter the with the snow crusting we sat by the heater listening to newscasts of UFO sightings while Mother told us that when the aliens came they would want a few very special people to take back with them and study. She said I would be one and I sat hugging myself waiting anxiously for them to arrive.
K. finds prison preferable to freedom. “Here the rules are clear. The bunk is mine. I can lie in it all day if I want to. Nobody cares how I feel or what I think or anything as long as I obey the rules and don’t cause trouble. It’s winter on the streets. It’s warm here.” Eventually she’s arraigned and then bailed out by a guy she knows, who rents her a hotel room, gives her money to buy new clothes, and tells her he’ll be back in the evening to pick her up for a date. The message is clear: Dogsbody is going to have to earn K.’s keep. The novel concludes on a paradoxical split-screen: K. is sinking into the soft mattress of the hotel bed; K. is on a westbound train alone. Are these events occurring in sequence? Is one real and one fantasy? If so, which is which?
Attic is an astonishing novel, vivid and disturbing, foul and sad, not least because K.’s trauma is rooted in bodily shame. Much of this is the fault of her cruel, crazy mother; some, inevitably, is traceable to men. But there’s something deeper at work here that seems to originate from within K. herself. We see it most prominently in the self-estrangement of Dogsbody, but it’s also palpable in her fear of being seen using the toilet, her disgust at performing femininity as part of her sales job, and the steady aggregation of childhood memories evincing a horror about puberty. Late in the novel K. remembers being called to the school nurse’s office and told she needs to do something about her body odor. “All this was before Dogsbody when I still thought I would grow up to be a boy and wanted to—to be a man and free so it wouldn’t be dirty and I could love men.”
Dunn’s second novel, Truck, published in 1971, is narrated by a teenage girl named Jean, though she goes by Dutch. Denser and bleaker than Attic, Truck is one long howl of self-hatred and unconsummated desire. Dutch is in love with her male friend, Heydorf; she’s 15 and wracked by sexual desire yet says she has not gone through puberty. When Heydorf runs away from Portland to Los Angeles, Dutch follows. In one powerful scene she enters a stall in the women’s bathroom at the L.A. bus station to change out of the hideous lacy pink dress she’s been stuck wearing for the last few days. When she steps out of the stall wearing Levi’s and hiking boots, the other women in the restroom eye her suspiciously. “Catch sight of myself in the mirror,” she says, clearly pleased. “Ain’t any way you could tell I was a girl now.”
Dutch’s feelings for Heydorf are hardly reciprocated; he doesn’t seem to have desires, or much personality, at all. It is his very blankness that makes him an ideal screen for Dutch’s projections, but a bad choice for her lover and/or partner-in-crime. (Nevertheless, between Heydorf’s apparent asexuality and Dutch’s proto- or crypto-transness, the novel is ripe for rediscovery as a lost classic in the genre of the queer runaway story, alongside the novels of J.T. LeRoy and certain films of Gus Van Sant.) The pair set up camp in a state park where they can steal food from tourists and avoid the cops. Before long, Dutch reaches her breaking point:
I on my side away from him and he on his side toward me and his arm under my head and his belly against my back but not his prick. His belly but not that low. It misses my ass. My legs are curled and I straighten them and feel his legs but not his prick but I want it. The hand is asleep. If he is awake he put it there. It hungers between my legs and runs and he’s got to give it to me. He came out here with me and he sleeps here with me and if he weren’t here I could do it myself but I can’t do it with him here so he has to do it. It almost hurts and the empty runs wet into my pants seam and he’s got to. . . . He felt me and now he sees me and he sees it. That I want it. It’s there and he must see it. And the arm doesn’t move and the head moves. It turns away but the arm stays and the white skin turns away and the eyes are gone but he has to look and give it to me, but he’s afraid. He’s afraid.
Rather than give it to her, Heydorf leaves. Alone, Dutch starves and raves, trying to catch fish with a jerry-rigged hook and line, vainly awaiting his return. Things get pretty existential as she imagines herself being eaten by a shark. “Big bite. It’s all over. Least I know what happened. Know where the other half is . . . So he uses it all. Turns it into shark. So now I’m half shark. Lead a double life. You are who eats you. Rather be one godawful mother shark than forty million fucking bugs.” Eventually Dutch is found by the authorities and reunited with her family, who bake her a welcome-home cake and insist on calling her Jean. “They want me but I’m not theirs anymore,” she thinks, even as she allows herself to be superficially reintegrated into the family, female adolescence, and so-called normal life. “I’m not here. I went away and I didn’t come back.”
Though Dunn’s world is defined by its focus on bodies and desire, there’s relatively little sex in her work. In Geek Love, the most consequential coupling—between the lovelorn albino humpbacked dwarf, Oly, and her psychotic cult leader brother, Arturo the Aquaboy—is achieved at a physical remove via psychic intercession. (It would take more space than I have here to clarify the preceding sentence, so let it hopefully suffice to say that their incestuous lovechild, however misbegotten, is for all intents and purposes immaculately conceived.) Still, Dunn’s interest in eros, filth, queerness, and misanthropy suggest her as an unlikely fellow traveler of Kathy Acker, who was roughly her age and started publishing around the same time. Certainly, one can find ideas and approaches in Attic and Truck that, like Acker’s work, anticipate the arrival of New Narrative. Lynne Tillman, Robert Gluck, and Eileen Myles are all around Dunn’s age; Gary Indiana, Dodie Bellamy, Chris Kraus, and Dennis Cooper are younger, but not by much. While Geek Love in particular anticipates, and directly influenced, the work of contemporary magical realists like Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado, and Leni Zumas, a parallel path can be charted from her early novels to the visceral, viscous oeuvres of Ottessa Moshfegh, Jenny Zhang, and Eimar McBride. They are in a sense her children whether they know it or not.
Dunn’s third novel, Toad, was sold on spec to Harper and Row, who had published her first two books, but they rejected the manuscript she turned in. At their urging, she made substantial revisions and resubmitted it, only to have it rejected again. She shopped it around throughout the ’70s but eventually relegated it to the drawer. Toad is narrated by Sally Gunnar, a middle-aged woman who prefers the company of mass-market mystery novels and her pet goldfish to that of other people. She putters around her house thinking about a group of friends she had when she was a college student in the ’60s. (The novel is based on Dunn’s time at Reed and tracks the curdling of her enthusiasm for both the school and the era.) “Some of us despise our own youth with a vague and bitter nostalgia and fixate on our worst phrases and acts with miserable clarity,” Sally says. “It’s a relief for me, in a way, to remember these scenes, to re-create them, to breathe through them again with the cynicism I’ve gained since. I am glad they can never happen to me again.” Sally’s friends are privileged, selfish naifs in love with the idea of themselves as revolutionaries, free lovers, off-grid homesteaders, and artistes, but in reality they are constantly bickering, philosophizing, and getting high. One of their houses is totally covered in cat feces; another has no indoor plumbing. There’s a lot of puking. For some reason, the group always buys horse meat to cook with instead of beef. When, inevitably, a tragedy tears apart the friend group, it’s hard to feel they have lost much in losing each other. Sally, for one, is clearly happier alone, though still not particularly happy. Like Dutch and K. before her, Sally insists on living life on her own terms, no matter the personal cost. Dunn’s protagonists are almost always isolated and isolating, bristling at connection and rebuking tenderness. It took her until Geek Love to figure out how to assert this as an affirmative value rather than as a mere rejection of society and/or its norms.
The critic Adrienne Raphel, writing in the New York Times Magazine in 2022, suggested—correctly, in my view—that Toad is a kind of bridge between Dunn’s early and late work. “Geek Love exists only because Dunn figured out how to feel through Toad,” Raphel argued. “It offers not the freakish yet relatable pyrotechnics of circus life, but the unglamorous musings of middle age. If Geek Love is, as the French say, jolie laide (ugly-pretty), then Toad is just ugly.” Bursting with incest, elective amputations, manipulative cults, predatory capitalists, and murder, Geek Love is indeed a dark and ugly novel—but all of this is counterbalanced by the magical realism of the premise and the sheer fun of the goth peacocking. The novel is a cri de couer for the maladjusted and misshapen, its grand vision one of triumph for the freaks and, indeed, the geeks as well. There’s a reason that four decades out from publication, Geek Love is still inspiring scads of fan art, including no small number of tattoos. (Last year, more than fifty visual artists contributed work to “Carnival Fabulon,” a show in tribute to Geek Love put on at Portland’s Brassworks Gallery.) Toad, by contrast, is a book about resignation, refusal, and defeat; there’s nothing to cri de couer for.
For Raphel, Toad’s purity of ugliness isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Her ultimate judgment of the novel is that it is “sad, funny and, most of all, deeply, unapologetically, ordinary. . . . Toad, like Dunn herself, is defiantly, triumphantly, its own thing.” This too is true as far as it goes, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s Dunn’s weakest work. It’s an interesting B-side, a curiosity, the work of a writer caught between incarnations. With all due respect to Dunn and her contemporary champions, it’s just not that hard to imagine a publisher—or a bunch of them—reading this manuscript, seeing the P&L sheets on the first two books, and deciding to take a pass. There but for the grace of God go all of us.
Most of the previously published stories in Near Flesh originally appeared in obscure and long-defunct local Portland literary journals like Clinton Street Quarterly and Mississippi Mud. One of my favorites, “The Allies,” first appeared in a 1996 anthology of short speculative fiction called David Copperfield’s Beyond Imagination (named for the stage magician, not the Dickens character). The story’s premise is nearly identical to a passage in Attic in which K.’s mother tells her to prepare for the arrival of aliens, but its style is light years away from the novel’s claustrophobic stream of consciousness. Rather, it’s told in a sprightly third person, with a sinister sunniness and uncanny domesticity suggestive of James Purdy or Rachell Ingalls.
Mrs. Reddle is painting in her living room while listening to radio reports of possible UFO sightings when her daughter Edie comes home from high school. When the story shifts into Edie’s perspective, we learn that Mrs. Reddle is rage-prone and delusional, though she seems to be in a good mood today. The two chat amiably about Edie’s social life. Eventually, Mrs. Reddle tells Edie that when the aliens come, they’ll probably want to meet her because she’s so beautiful, smart, and special. She has no reason to fear them and should embrace her role as an ambassador. Later, alone in her bedroom, Edie’s repressed emotions come out in a rush: “A coward, a flatterer, a liar, she called herself, counting the night’s crop of soft phrases spewed to control her mother’s moods and fears.” It turns out that the rich social life she has described for her mother over the last several pages is entirely fictional. She stands in front of the mirror and berates herself. “Why won’t she let me be ugly?” Edie asks, sounding strikingly like Toad’s Sally. “‘Mama,’ she whispered, ‘the boys moo at me in the halls. Mama,’ she muttered, ‘Mama, you’re crazy and I’m a sucker.” The story is hopeless, but it is not quite heartless. It ends on a note of unexpected pathos, with Edie looking out her bedroom window, imagining the arrival of the aliens, and—just for a moment—what it would be like to be the version of herself that her delusional mother sees, the one who would be worthy of welcoming them.
We get a rare glimpse of a non-monstrous mother in “The Well,” a taut suspense tale. Gilly and Devin Sender and their 4-year-old son, Corey, “a frail, crystalline child with exaggerated sensibilities and a collection of night fears,” are living in a remote rural farmhouse. One day Gilly falls into a well and the water level is so low she cannot climb out. Since her husband is not around, she must shout instructions up to Corey and hope that he’s able to get help before she tires and drowns. “Process,” meanwhile, is a bittersweet charmer about a painter who primes a canvas for decades but never starts painting his picture. It feels like something Bernard Malamud might have written. “The Novitiate” and “A Revelation of Mrs. Andes” are firmly realist portraits of proletarian poverty, less Malamud than Lucia Berlin.
In the title story, a sci-fi exploration of sexualized self-loathing, a woman named Thelma Vole is deciding which of her several sex robots to take with her on a work trip that happens to fall on her birthday. There’s The Wimp, whom she likes to abuse; Lips, whose mouth is a vibrator; The Brain, who is intellectually stimulating and seems to genuinely care for her, but is a computer terminal without a proper robot body; and Bluto, “a sophisticated instrument that could swoop her up and carry her to the shower or the bed or the kitchen table and make her feel (within carefully programmed limits) quite small and helpless.” It’s an unusually explicit story for Dunn, even if all the sex is machinic. (The story first appeared in a 1991 anthology called The Ultimate Frankenstein, alongside work by writers such as Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut.) To a contemporary reader “Near Flesh” may feel like an eerily prescient parable about ChatGPT, but The Brain is more than a souped-up autocomplete or a digital hall of mirrors. The love he’s offering is real enough for Thelma’s temptation to be more than delusion. She takes to tormenting The Brain by (I’m not sure how else to say this) cucking him with other sex robots, and, in classic Dunn style, the story culminates in an act of self-destructive violence.
The excerpts from The Cut Man (“Rhonda Discovers Art” and “Screaming Angel”) are among the weakest entries in the collection; in them, you can feel Dunn straining to recapture the antic magic of her erstwhile bestseller. And while a few other stories left me similarly cold, the devotion, commitment, vision, and work that went into producing this volume are all extraordinary. The best stories—“The Allies,” “Process,” “The Education of Mrs. R,” and “The Resident Poet” chief among them—are genuine revelations, not merely in relation to the rest of Dunn’s work, but in their own right and on their own terms. “The Resident Poet”, about an unhappy tryst between an undergrad and a visiting professor at a school that can only be a stand-in for Reed College, is a study in mutual enmity. It’s also another exception to her general tendency toward non-consummation. The student and the poetry prof eat bad takeout, drive to a seedy motel on the Oregon coast, and have pitiful, joyless sex. (“The Resident Poet” caused a sensation when it appeared posthumously in the New Yorker in 2020, for reasons that I assume are self-evident given the summary I just offered.) Re-reading the story as part of this collection, I found myself drawn to the less provocative aspects of the work, particularly Dunn’s eye for detail and the fundamental forlornness of the Pacific Northwest. A description of an off-season beach town reads like a Hopper painting: “Dusk is falling now, the gray day sneaking out, when we pass a laundromat. It stands all by itself on the road outside the town. Rough beach grass hisses against the cinder blocks of the building, and its one big window looks across the road to the marsh that leads to the sea.” Though hardly a “regional writer” Dunn is nonetheless one of the great writers of this region; in that regard, we should think of her alongside Richard Brautigan and Raymond Carver just as readily as we do the sundry literary outlaws and cultists cataloged above.
Because the collection errs on the side of wide inclusion, we get some small gems, like “Fanno Creek” and “Pieces,” that would have likely been left out of a narrower selection. In the former, a girl swims in a polluted creek hoping to catch a cold so her voice will be lower so she can gain more confidence as a public speaker. It’s fascinating as a germinal version of the premise of Geek Love, and conceivably also another example of gender dysphoria. “Pieces” is a group of vignettes about dismemberment. In one of them, an American soldier in Vietnam cuts off the ear of a fallen enemy soldier only to be wracked by remorse years after the war. While working as a trail clearer for a park service, he decides to chop off one of his own fingers with an axe as penance. The ending of the episode is echt Dunn: gruesome, blackly comic, resolutely working class. “At the hospital he tried to explain why he was so happy. But the crew chief told the admitting nurse it was an accident on the job, that the wounded man was in shock, delirious. He whispered harshly into Davey’s ear, ‘Shut the fuck up. Worker’s comp won’t pay for spiritual atonement.’” You can say that again.
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