Toad

Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world.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, & 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, & 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; & Rennel, a self-obsessed philosophy student. Self-deprecating & sardonic, Sally recounts their misadventures, up to the tragedy that tore them apart. 

Colorful, crass, & 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 & Dunn a misfit hero. Daring & bizarre, Toad demonstrates her genius for black humor & her ecstatic celebration of the grotesque. 

Fifty-some years after it was written, Toad is a timely story about the ravages of womanhood & a powerful addition to the canon of feminist fiction.

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