A previously unpublished novel of the reflections of a deeply scarred
and reclusive woman, from the cult icon Katherine Dunn, the author of
Geek Love.
Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world. She spends her days alone at
home, reading drugstore mysteries, polishing the doorknobs, waxing the
floors. Her only companions are a vase of goldfish, a garden toad, and
the door-to-door salesman who sells her cleaning supplies once a month.
She broods over her deepest regrets: her blighted romances with
self-important men, her lifelong struggle to feel at home in her own
body, and her wayward early twenties, when she was a fish out of water
among a group of eccentric, privileged young people at a liberal arts
college. There was Sam, an unabashed collector of other people's
stories; Carlotta, a troubled free spirit; and Rennel, a self-obsessed
philosophy student. Self-deprecating and sardonic, Sally recounts their
misadventures, up to the tragedy that tore them apart.
Colorful, crass, and profound, Toad is Katherine Dunn's ode to her
time as a student at Reed College in the late 1960s. It is filled with
the same mordant observations about the darkest aspects of human nature
that made Geek Love a cult classic and Dunn a misfit hero. Daring and
bizarre, Toad demonstrates her genius for black humor and her ecstatic
celebration of the grotesque. Fifty-some years after it was written,
Toad is a timely story about the ravages of womanhood and a powerful
addition to the canon of feminist fiction.
