NEAR FLESH

An outsider author’s posthumous career continues with her first story collection.

As Dunn’s 1989 novel, Geek Love, continues to charm fans old and new, her star has continued to ascend since her death in 2016; this collection follows a well-received posthumous novel, Toad (2022). It contains stories that were published during her lifetime in the New Yorker, Redbook, and elsewhere, as well as many not seen until now. For those familiar with her work, one of the main pleasures of the book is noticing her preoccupations and following the connections; plots revolving around amputated limbs and people falling from buildings will come as no surprise. This horror-adjacent work and the somewhat-deranged everywoman character at the center of stories like “The Education of Mrs. R,” “The Novitiate,” and “A Revelation of Mrs. Andes” connect Dunn to her contemporary Rachel Ingalls (Mrs. Caliban). “The Resident Poet” seems an outtake from or a warm-up for Toad, with the same protagonist, Sally, and a setting inspired by Dunn’s two years at Reed College. A self-conscious character like Sally is also central to “Near Flesh,” a dark satire about a corporate manager who has four sex robots: Wimp, Lips, Bluto, and the Brain, the last of whom she’s afraid of because it knows her too well. Fat and unhappy is also the plight of the teen character in “The Allies”: miserable on Earth, she may be moving on to life with extraterrestrials. “Rhonda Discovers Art” originally ran in the Paris Review as an excerpt from the novel that was to follow, Geek Love, but never came out, though Dunn worked on it for many years. Rhonda, who committed a murder in her youth, becomes obsessed with a performance artist who enacts near-death experiences on stage. She’s also the protagonist of “Screaming Angel,” which is set at a boxing match, another of Dunn’s major preoccupations.

These sharp-edged, disturbing, often black-humored and unabashedly nasty stories will fascinate Dunn fans.