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FOREWORD

Molly Crabapple

Sally Gunnar is a hermit—by choice. She lives on an ill-gotten pension in a godforsaken town. Occasional visitors aside, her main companions are the goldfish who swim inside an old pickle jug upon her lovingly appointed breakfast table. Who needs humans when you have memories? Ugly, sensuous, and scathing, Sally Gunnar hides within her domestic fortress, content to bake her bread and luxuriate in her regrets, until, one day, her sister-in-law mentions two names that “slit [her] neatly from skull to crotch, and leave two halves gaping bloodily at the fish.”

Sam. Carlotta.

From those two names unspools Toad, Katherine Dunn’s harrowing novel of lust and death set among the hippie burnouts of 1960s Portland, Oregon, where the drugs flow, the pretense flies, the delusion soars, and where, thanks to the counterculture, young women have choices … but all of them are bad. Dunn wrote Toad during the seventies, when she was a single mom slinging drinks at a dive bar so rough that once a patron tried to slit her throat.* It was her third novel, and she wrote it during a deep depression. She never published it. Despair, said her son, Eli Dapolonia, was not her style.*

Her fourth novel was Geek Love. Published in 1989, it smashed the best-seller list, and made Dunn into a bona fide countercultural goddess.

Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a family of itinerant carny freaks. Over thirty years after its publication, it is a totem for outcasts—born and made—the world over. It is the novel most likely to be referenced in a tattoo, an illegal mural, a strip club dressing room, or the smokers’ parking lot outside a home for troubled girls. In my own misspent youth, I memorized Geek Love the way British schoolboys memorized The Odyssey. I also wanted to find my fictional forebears. The Binewski parents, Al and Crystal Lil, produced each of their children with love, hallucinogens, and radioactive waste, and taught them to hold themselves haughtily apart from the straight world. I too held myself haughtily apart from the good blond children who liked to throw Coke bottles at my head. For weird kids like me, Geek Love was both a respite and a weapon.

For all the freaks that Al and Crystal Lil created, they had their failures—the six dead babies who floated in jars in a special section of their carnival called The Chute. Until recently, Toad held a similar place. It sat unread and unknown, while Geek Love, Katherine Dunn’s most famous child, splashed its way across the world.