Flesh Under Pressure

Chelsea Davis considers Katherine Dunn’s posthumous story collection ‘Near Flesh.’

By Chelsea DavisJanuary 4, 2026

• Fiction

• SF

NEAR FLESH (2025), the first short fiction collection by the late Katherine Dunn, author of the best-selling novel Geek Love (1989), opens with a story that captures many of her oeuvre’s key themes: the ubiquity of violence, the perversities of fate, and human resilience, all framed by dark, dark humor. It also teases an organizational logic for the collection to come.

These are impressive feats for a featherweight of just five pages—not even a story, really, but a sketch, cohering around a single place rather than a single plot. “Pieces” excavates the histories behind an assortment of amputated limbs and organs stored in a mortuary. These lonely chunks of flesh are kept on ice for years or even decades because their amputee owners believe they can’t get into heaven without them, without their bodies being made whole in burial. Browsing the drawers of body parts, we meet the toes of a skier who lost his little piggies to frostbite and prefers “vacations in the tropics” these days. Nearby are “the boxed breasts of the senator who didn’t stop wearing wigs even though all her hair grew back after the chemo.” A veteran haunted by his wartime mutilation of an enemy corpse cuts off his own finger in atonement (and gets workers’ comp out of the deal). It’s synecdoche in its purest form, each specimen standing in for a person. (Dunn also deployed this gallery-style storytelling in Geek Love, whose family of circus freaks lovingly preserves their DOA siblings—and, by extension, their biographies—in an array of jars.) 

A mini-anthology of human pain, “Pieces” asks what meaning can be found in life’s random suffering. Throughout Near Flesh, Dunn roundly rejects the consolations of fantasy—specifically, in “Pieces,” the balm of religious belief, though elsewhere the chief target is the pastoral idyll—and instead applauds the harder beauties of scrappy survival. “Pieces” takes equal delight in tearing off a mechanic’s finger on the job and in watching him move on with his life. Once the injury heals, he “entertain[s] the nieces and nephews by bringing out the jar” in which the finger is stored.

Many of the morgue’s unholy relics are never successfully reunited with their proprietors and, thus lacking any “connective element,” are sent to the crematorium for destruction. As a meditation on the process of crafting a larger whole from disparate parts, “Pieces” evokes the editorial anxieties inherent in posthumously curating an author’s work. Some “pieces sit frozen for months or years until enough of them have collected on the cold shelves”; likewise, many of the pieces published in Near Flesh have waited decades to see the light of day. (Naomi Huffman plumbed Dunn’s archives at Lewis & Clark College to produce this book, along with Dunn’s novel Toad, posthumously published in 2022.)

The collection provides no introduction, foreword, or afterword—a restrained choice given how much one could say about this particular writer, who died in 2016. Dunn’s smash hit Geek Love (if not her other three novels, which tragically few people read) has attained what is sometimes labeled a “cult following” but should really at this point just be called “popularity.” Other editors and critics of Dunn’s work have capitalized on the massive fandom and shock value attached to Dunn’s big book (which is about an incestuous circus sideshow), and on the fascinating qualities of her own hardscrabble autobiography (abusive, impoverished childhood; gigs as a topless dancer and a bar bouncer; blood-spattered career as a boxing reporter), to connect the lurid brutality of the author’s life to the lurid brutality of her fiction.

There’s nothing wrong with framing Dunn’s work in this way. The rhymes between the Oregonian’s life and her writings are undeniable and interesting. But the strong temptation of an autobiographical reading does make it all the more admirable that Near Flesh instead invites us to take in Dunn’s short fiction on its own terms—to examine the collection in direct sunlight, beyond the long shadows of Geek Love and Dunn’s lived experience. Happily, the 18 stories gathered here (two-thirds of which have not been previously published) hold up to the scrutiny.

The rest of the collection follows the loosely “connective” logic that “Pieces” announces: the stories are arranged in a loose braid, with similar themes placed back-to-back. (Two works, “Rhonda Discovers Art” and “Screaming Angel,” even reuse the same character, whom Dunn intended to eventually place at the center of a novel.) Hence the second story, “I Had the Baby on My Left Hip,” revisits the motif of body parts introduced in “Pieces.” In “I Had the Baby,” a parent—no gender is specified, but in the broader context of Dunn’s fiction, it’s a fair guess to say it’s a mother—survives an explosion on a city street, possibly a bombing. While holding their own (unscathed) infant, the narrator finds a severed baby foot still in its shoe, “pumping red, quietly, gently,” and searches fruitlessly for its tiny owner.

Near Flesh often treats motherhood and violence as two sides of the same coin—or sword. To protect something vulnerable takes ferocity—especially in the conditions of near-poverty that are Dunn’s favored setting. In the 1994 essay “Just as Fierce,” Dunn (who wrote constantly about women but often dissented from the orthodoxies of mainstream feminism) argued that “most of us would not be here without a generous sprinkling of physically aggressive women in our bloodlines. Throughout most of human history, long before antibiotics and prepackaged foods, many women […] had to be fierce or their young did not survive.”

But Near Flesh also suggests that, once honed, that loving aggression is not easy to switch off, and can easily ricochet back toward the vulnerable themselves. (Dunn’s own mother hit her with a variety of objects, including a screwdriver.) In “The Novitiate,” a newly destitute woman moves to a rough part of town with her young son. Fretting constantly over the seeming dangers of their apartment complex—in which she hears drunks brawling and vomiting at all hours—the nameless mother glimpses a creepy man just outside her living room and “instinctively, immediately, push[es her] child hard away from the window.” The toddler bursts into tears, and, dismayed by her outburst, the mother stands “cradling the whole small body—his wet face on her shoulder, her own face pressed to his hair.”

This crazed swing between maternal toughness and tenderness is also on display in “The Education of Mrs. R.,” in which a housewife realizes with horror that her cherished daughter has been watching her kill roosters, and “The Blowtorch,” wherein a woman battles bitterly against her husband’s attempts to draw their son into a dangerous Christian cult. In the latter story, the mother catches her little boy burning his own thumb with matches, training himself to “pass through fire” like the “Chosen” men his father admires. She springs into action, expertly treating the wound with water and antiseptic ointment. But her solicitude soon hardens into disgust over the boy’s resemblance to his idiot father, and she sets the child down abruptly, concluding that “she didn’t know him anymore. She didn’t like him.”

Moments of explicit emotional revelation like these are especially potent in Near Flesh because they’re so rare. As the collection’s title suggests, Dunn tends to convey inner experience not by naming her characters’ feelings but by describing their actions and bodies. The latter are almost universally revolting, by the way, whether they’re exploding across the sidewalk (I count three deaths by high-rise jump), “filling with fluid” after a punch so they look “like a tennis ball trying to hatch,” or appearing bluntly sexual while being stripped of eros (in “The Resident Poet,” a student lies next to her professor after bedding him, “scum bubbling on [her] thighs, looking at the foam on his wrinkled little prick”). But Dunn reserves her greatest contempt for fat characters, whose bodies—“globular” and “thick,” “round” and “stubby”—never escape comment and often seem a source of shame to their owners.

Indeed, over the course of her long writing career, the only human forms for which Dunn consistently expressed admiration were those belonging to boxers. “His lean muscle is defined in the white light,” she wrote of the welterweight Francisco Roche in a typical passage from a 1983 essay. “He’s as fragile as a bullwhip, a city panther […] His face is wildly beautiful.” Violence was an irrepressible and important part of human nature for Dunn, and she loved that the prizefighter made a poetry of it. That was the proper use of flesh.

Even—especially—at its most grotesque, Dunn’s prose has a real verve to it. “Our challenge is to revive the language with vivid reinvention,” to “bring zest and sting to [it],” she once told MFA students in a lecture that was later published as the 2019 essay “On Cussing.” It’s a tall order, reinventing English and all, but one that Near Flesh often delivers on. Dunn’s oddball metaphors and word choices play against type but still work, as in “Rhonda Discovers Art,” when “a soft day the temperature of blood” foreshadows gruesome tragedy. The narrator of “The Resident Poet” boasts bitterly that she hasn’t been in love “since the first juicy spurt of youth.” It’s an evocatively gross image whose sibilance feels lewd on the tongue.

Despite Dunn’s well-deserved reputation for freaky shit, though, it is some of the quieter stories that linger longest after one shuts the covers of Near Flesh. “The Well” and “The Allies,” both claustrophobic studies of families under stress, gradually accrete tremendous dread, no geysers of blood required. And the pathos they evoke for their outsider characters—a lonely housewife in the former story, a daughter struggling to keep the peace during a potential alien invasion in the latter—stand out all the more starkly against the backdrop of Dunn’s typical anti-sentimentality. One of the stories even has a happy ending.

That happy ending is still earned through sweat and tears, though (if not blood). It wouldn’t be a Katherine Dunn production if someone got off easy. Dunn deeply distrusts escapism; throughout the collection, as well as in her novels, fantasy and violence are conjoined twins. (This theme takes its most literal form in the title story, a prescient SF offering in which a lonely middle manager gives up on interhuman love and abuses a coterie of a sex robots instead.) Daydreaming about perfect elsewheres and somebodies keeps her characters stuck in their ruts. Only pain and violence can pierce that veil for Dunn, slapping awake the sleeper for worse and for better.

Some might find that a cruel calculus. Others will see in it a hard optimism. In the final sentences of “The Education of Mrs. R.,” a former city slicker passes through a baptism of gore—slaughtering 50 roosters by hand—after moving to the country, a lifestyle she’d formerly idealized. She washes the blood off herself, then “stretche[s] her clean, soft hands beneath the white light and smile[s], admiring their strength.”