A previously unpublished novel of the reflections of a deeply scarred and reclusive woman from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 Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the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.
