They host parties, smoke grass, and trade the sort of drily humorous quips where someone says “looks just like somebody’s house” about somebody’s house. Sally falls in with a group of philosophy majors, hippies, and slumming rich kids led by a dopily charismatic young man named Sam, before falling irrevocably out with them after a tragedy. The book’s plot, as much as it could be said to have one, is mostly a recounting of the period in her early twenties when she took classes at an unnamed college, based on Reed where Dunn received a full scholarship in 1965.

Sally is a wounded woman, but she’s also inflicted wounds on others. “The old patterns of my life are wrinkled but they persist, and probably will until I fold them neatly around me in my grave.” She lives on the dole in a small rented house outside Portland with a pair of goldfish, and spends much of her time brooding over her misspent youth. Sally, though, is somewhat unique in that she’s confined in both. It’s a trait she shares with Dunn’s other protagonists, who are often marked by their confinement-sometimes, as in her debut, Attic, in actual places like a prison and sometimes in their own bodies.

Like Dunn’s three other novels, Toad is told by a first-person female narrator, in this case a woman named Sally Gunnar who has deliberately hidden herself away from the world. Lucky for us, then, that Toad is one of those books. Regardless of the provenance, the best case scenario with endeavors like these is that readers won’t care how they were conceived they’ll just be grateful to be in the author’s hands again. As Molly Crabapple’s foreword tells it, this new novel comes to us almost fifty years after it was first written. That’s certainly the case with Katherine Dunn, whose cult classic Geek Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989, but who only published four other books before her death in 2016. But it’s also irresistible, particularly for an author whose output was limited during her lifetime.

And if it’s a book that was hidden away in a drawer for a number of years, chances are there’s a reason why. Unless the writer managed to finish the manuscript before she passed, the resulting book is often a work of assemblage and hearsay, incomplete and speculative by nature and thus rarely conventionally satisfying.

The posthumous publication of a beloved author can be a dicey proposition.

Katherine dunn author