Katherine Dunn, you would have loved “The Substance.”
Thirty-six years after the publication of Dunn’s cult classic “Geek Love,” comes “Near Flesh,” a collection of 19 short stories mostly unpublished during her lifetime. Macmillan Publishers will release the collection Oct. 7.
As bell hooks wrote in “Killing Rage,” “the rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.”
Portland icon and author Katherine Dunn understood oppression and rage — channeling that understanding into her writing. Dunn’s largely female protagonists display both subtle and overt acts of resistance against the roles assigned to them as wife, mother and woman. The volatility of female characters is a common characteristic, catalyzing the plot around them.
In “The Allies,” Dunn describes Mrs. Reddle as “either happy or furious, with no mediocre moods for transition or warning.”
While listening to reports of a UFO off the coast, Mrs. Reddle’s mood rises and falls with emotion aimed at her husband, son and daughter, Edie.
Edie speaks with the intention to “control her mother’s moods and fears,” revealing a generational responsibility passed from mother to daughter.
Dunn’s visceral descriptions serve almost as characters themselves. In “Pieces,” eyes don’t see, they skate. In “Famo Creek” food isn’t eaten, but wolfed in as fuel. In “The Blowtorch” anger isn’t felt, it fills limbs.
As in her previous works, Dunn does not shy away from the psychology of ugliness — exploring people who assign and get assigned the descriptor of “ugly.”
“Why won’t she let me be ugly?” Edie asks. “Why does she blind herself and cripple me?”
If ugliness is ever-present, why resist it?
Dunn gives ugliness a sense of worth, preferring her characters to be interesting and compelling in their ugliness.
Endless Drafts
Dunn was born in Kansas in 1945, and later moved to Tigard with her mother and step-father. After leaving home at the age of 17, she received a full scholarship to Reed College. She dropped out in 1967 to travel with Dante Dapolonia and gave birth to her only son, Eli Dapolonia, in 1970.
While traveling, Dunn wrote the novels “Truck” and “Attic,” to little acclaim.
Returning as a single mother in 1975, Dunn and Dapolonia settled in Northwest Portland. Dunn worked as a waitress at Stepping Stone Cafe in the mornings and bartended at the Earth Tavern in the evenings.
Between shifts and being a mother, Dunn wrote.
“I remember falling asleep to the sound of her old manual typewriter clacking away in the background,” Dapolonia said.
For most of his childhood, Dapolonia said, the two lived in a studio apartment, where he slept in a closet.
During the summers, the pair couldn’t afford the 75 cent entry fee at the public pool. Instead, Dunn took Dapolonia to play in the public fountains downtown.
The publication of “Geek Love” changed their lives. Dunn moved the two of them to a six-bedroom house next to their old apartment.
Dapolonia remembers his mother’s highly curious nature and lifelong philosophy: everyone has a story to tell.
“She was interested in the idea that women could be just as strong and dangerous and lethal as men in the right circumstances,” Dapolonia said.
A life-long smoker, Dunn died in 2016 of lung cancer.
According to Dapolonia, Dunn wrote short stories her whole life and always talked about publishing an anthology.
Dapolonia manages his mother’s estate, and sent the manuscript of Dunn’s unpublished novel, “Toad,” to the publishing company Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
“The original ‘Toad’ manuscript was in rough shape,” Dapolonia said in an interview with Street Roots. “It was typewritten manuscript with handwritten notes in the margins. It was unscannable, the quality of the print was such that you couldn’t scan it into a Word document.”
“Toad” follows a group of reckless college students in the 1960s as they navigate counterculture and the “hippie patriarchy,” released in 2022.
Around the same time, Dapolonia gave editor and publisher Naomi Huffman access to a collection of his mother’s short stories. Huffman chose from the collection to curate “Near Flesh.”
Dunn’s archives are currently housed in 80 boxes at the special collections section of the Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. The archive consists of fan mail, hand-typed drafts, illustrations and news articles.
“Having her archive is a useful resource to show the drafting process,” said Hannah Crummé, head of special collections at Lewis & Clark. “It seems like she had endless drafts.”
Cult Classic
The unfinished, unrefined mystique innate to Dunn’s life and work creates a parasocial relationship between author and reader. Ten of the 80 boxes in her archive are filled with letters, art, even attempted sequels and continuations written by fans.
In an exhibit hosted at the Watzek called “the horror of normalcy,” about the cult following of Katherine Dunn, English Professor Michael Mirabile writes: “What about cult fiction in general inspires such dedicated followings? Opinions differ: some critics mention obscurity, others mention a direct engagement with an identifiable subculture. Still others suggest that even the prose of works of cult fiction may be regarded as generationally specific — the style of an era.”
“Near Flesh” takes its name from the 16th story, out of 19 in the collection.
In the title installment, protagonist Thelma Vole is a displeased working woman hated by her coworkers. She sources her intimacy from a collection of male robots that come to life when touched at the groin.
Her scrutiny of the robots’ bodies mimics the patriarchal scrutiny faced by young women — Vole is frustrated with her robots’ outward appearances and judges them on their ability to provide her sexual pleasure. When she touches the robots, she only feels “near-flesh.”
The robot she feels most affection towards, The Brain, is built without a male body. It “has the capacity to love but not demonstrate love.”
When Vole finally finances building a body for The Brain, she ends up feeling disgust, shoving it in a closet and torturing it with jealousy.
Dunn’s legacy serves as a beacon of the Portland literary scene and its attractive “weirdness.”
Her stories are a brief window into the life of a writer with an imperfect, often unfinished process, who maintained her style and tone, eventually finding her target audience. The continuation of her work by current publishers and the timely release of “Near Flesh” opens up a whole new generation of readers to feel seen by Dunn’s celebration of the other.
The mother-child relationship in “The Allies” mimics that of Annie and her children, Peter and Charlie, in the 2018 film “Hereditary.” The blood- and chicken feather-soaked protagonist of “The Education of Mrs. R” is reminiscent of the young aspiring actress and farmhand Pearl in the 2022 film of the same name. The mangled body parts of “Pieces” reflect 2024’s “The Substance.”
The stories straddle reality, close enough to be relatable, but far enough away to remain otherworldly. The horror and thriller genres often reflect the greater fears of a given time period. From her work, Dunn’s reflected the fear of being trapped in one’s circumstances and the unseemly quality of Portland in the 1980s. She responds to this fear, though, with a wink and sigh, daring her audience to understand her.
“My mother was very much an embracer of the idea of independence and counterculture and art and uniqueness,” Dapolonia said. “I think those are all things that I see in this current generation that seemed to be important.”
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
© 2025 Street Roots. All rights reserved. | To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657, ext. 40.
This article appears in October 1, 2025.