‘Geek Love’ put Katherine Dunn on the map

I first read “Geek Love,” Katherine Dunn’s breakout novel, shortly after its publication in 1989. Now seen as a classic, back then reading the novel felt like watching Tod Browning’s 1932 horror film “Freaks” in the backroom of a dubious club, its lights kept low so you wouldn’t see things you’d have a difficult time forgetting.

Dunn wasn’t afraid of staring into the shadows. “Geek Love” puts self-proclaimed freaks and monsters front and center. The novel recounts the history and hardships of the Binewski clan, carnival folk whose pater- and materfamilias, Al and Crystal Lil, create their own freak show. Using a prenatal diet of hallucinogens, speed and radioactive isotopes, the couple produce their mutant progeny: conjoined twins; Aqua Boy; a hunchback; a seemingly typical child with telekinesis; stillborn infants exhibited in jars.

“Geek Love” was Dunn’s third published novel — following “Attic” (1970) and “Truck” (1971) — but there was more. While working in Portland bars and restaurants to support herself and her young son, Dunn wrote a novel called “Toad.” Harper & Row, publishers of “Attic” and “Truck,” bought the book in 1971, but ultimately turned it down. (“Nobody in this book is likable!” she was told.) Despite interest from other publishers and years of revision, the book never found a home. In 1979, a final round of rejections caused Dunn to set aside the novel for good.

In 2016, at age 70, Dunn died of lung cancer. Her legacy, it seemed, would be a single, much beloved cult novel. “Geek Love” was a National Book Awards finalist, sold over a half-million copies and has never gone out of print.

After her death, Dunn’s son, along with numerous friends and fans, including editor Naomi Huffman, pushed to bring Dunn’s unpublished fiction into print. Huffman had uncovered “Toad” in Dunn’s substantial archive at Lewis & Clark College, along with a related short story, “The Resident Poet,” published in the New Yorker in 2020. Another story, “The Education of Mrs. R.,” has just appeared in the fall issue of the Paris Review.

This month, “Toad” finally made it out into the world.

“Toad” is a subdued, haunting novel. It is exhilarating, often disturbing, and as compelling in its way as Dunn’s best-known work. Its narrator is Sally Gunnar, seemingly a stand-in for the young Katherine Dunn. They share a birthday, an obsession with Reed College (Dunn attended Reed on a full scholarship, but never graduated), a history of poverty and depression. (Though while Sally describes her own “enormous ugliness,” period photos depict Dunn as a wry beauty.) The story drifts back and forth between Sally as a 20-year-old student and her much older, “clean spinsterish” self, who recalls her hapless college friends, “bohemian slobs” like herself.

A 1979 rejection letter commented that “Toad” “seems to be basically autobiographical, by which I mean that things are there not for any reason except that they happened.” Another editor complained that the story was “too minutely interested in things.”