There should be a whole book about Rhonda Bacon.
In the short story “Screaming Angel,” Rhonda is on her way to a boxing match when she comes upon a gruesome scene on a Las Vegas sidewalk. A security guard has fallen to his death from the top of a hotel, and his mangled body is still sprawled on the pavement.
But Rhonda is feeling chipper, and as she steps carefully through the gore, she pauses to admire a police officer’s posterior.
“I thought it was against regulations, cramming all that paraphernalia into their pants pockets,” she says, more or less to herself. “Notebooks, handcuffs. Ugly bulges on fine young cop butts. What possesses them?”
We want to root for this insouciant young woman, who apparently takes the world however it comes, but this story is written by Katherine Dunn. The late Portland author never made it that easy.
In an earlier entry in “Near Flesh,” Dunn’s new short story collection, we learn that when Rhonda was 9 years old, she lashed out at a 10-year-old bully one afternoon, resulting in the boy’s tragic death. Except Rhonda, even after she has grown up, doesn’t see it as tragedy:
“When Rhonda replayed that day in her mind, the only thing she felt good about was bashing Tim ‘Tweezer’ Painton on the head and rolling him into the river. It was the right thing to do.”
We never gain any insight into Rhonda, into why she is the way she is and does the things she does. Dunn, it appears, wanted us to reach our own conclusions.
The author, who died in 2016 at 70, published very little fiction after her 1989 novel “Geek Love,” whose cult following continues to grow. In the years following that breakthrough success, she periodically put out personal essays and journalism, but she never finished her much-anticipated follow-up novel, a boxing tale called “Cut Man.”
In the past few years, old work from her archive has trickled out. The slim volume “On Cussing,” from Portland’s Tin House, arrived in 2019. The New Yorker published “The Resident Poet,” about a hard-nosed college girl having an affair with a professor, in 2020. Then came “Toad,” a dour novel Dunn tried and failed to get published in the 1970s.
Now arrives this collection of short stories. Many of the tales in it have never been published before or appeared only in obscure, long-gone indie publications. (The collection also includes “The Resident Poet.”)
Dates are not provided for the stories, but the early-career work shows itself. In some of the pieces in the first half of the book, Dunn is clearly figuring out what to write and how to write. These stories likely only made it into the collection because there weren’t any other options to push it to book length. They’re strictly for the author’s most obsessive fans.
The quality improves in the second half, with the book’s title story – a bracing narrative about a woman and her sex robots – proving especially memorable. “Near Flesh,” the entire collection as well as the short story of that name, leans hard on ambitious women and their sexual desires, outré subjects when they were written decades ago.
A lack of straightforward, beginning-middle-and-end plotting is common in the book, and it’s the one serious drag on the two Rhonda entries. “Screaming Angel” and “Rhonda Discovers Art” read like extracts, not complete stories. And they probably are. They just might have ended up in “Cut Man” if Dunn had been able to finish the novel.
The 18 stories of “Near Flesh” are a mishmash, to be sure, some of them rudimentary, others showcasing bounding ambition and incisive prose. They remind us that Dunn was a rare talent who struggled to manage that talent, leaving readers occasionally frustrated – and always wanting more.
“Near Flesh: Stories” ($28, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) publishes Oct. 21.
“Near Flesh: A Celebration of Katherine Dunn,” with authors Jeff VanderMeer and Omar El-Akkad, takes place Oct. 7 at 6:30 p.m. at Literary Arts, 716 SE Grand Avenue in Portland. The event is free.
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